The video, presented by Tata Consulting Engineers (TCE), outlines the critical role of steam condensers in power plants, the conventional challenges operators face in maintaining optimal condenser vacuum, and introduces TCE's DigitalPoint real-time AI-driven solution. It explains that condensers condense turbine exhaust steam, maintain vacuum, and manage condensate temperature, with design parameters defined by the Heat Exchanger Institute. Operators struggle to quantify parameter influences, handle vacuum variations across loads, and lack simple procedures for optimal vacuum, leading to efficiency losses during flexible operation. TCE's DigitalPoint solution leverages artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics to monitor condenser performance in real time, predict optimal pressure under varying conditions, provide early‑warning alerts, perform sensitivity analysis, diagnose deviations, and recommend remedial actions, thereby improving plant efficiency and profitability.
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Tata Consulting Engineers, with decades of domain expertise in plant engineering, has leveraged artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics to develop a digital point solution for condenser performance monitoring and diagnosis. This innovative solution can be used to monitor and optimize condenser performance in power plants. This digital point solution helps to improve condenser performance, assists in anomaly detection, provides root cause diagnosis, and hence improves the plant operation and profitability. This short video will be covering functioning of condenser, conventional approach and challenges, and finally our innovative digital point solution. Let's look at the functioning of condenser. Steam condensers are an inevitable equipment in power plants. The purpose of a surface condenser is to condense the exhaust steam from a steam turbine to obtain maximum efficiency and also to convert the turbine exhaust steam into condensate so that it can be recirculated through boiler as feedwater. The condenser is designed as per Heat Exchanger Institute or HEI, to operate at a defined vacuum level considering various parameters such as steam flow, cooling water flow, heat transfer area, terminal temperature difference, or TTD, etc. The performance of condenser has significant role in deciding the plant heat rate or efficiency. The main functions of the condenser are to condense the steam exhausted from the turbine, to maintain optimum vacuum, to maintain the temperature of condensate, to introduce makeup water, to facilitate the extraction of air and other gases. Now let's look at conventional management of condenser and the challenges in this approach. Power plant operators aim to achieve optimum condenser pressure to get maximum efficiency for the plant. Currently, the power plant operators are facing the following technical challenges maintaining the optimum condenser vacuum. Difficulty in quantifying the influence of each parameter on condenser vacuum. Variation in vacuum level with respect to different load conditions. No simple procedure to arrive at the optimum vacuum from the known operating parameters. Difficulty in extensive monitoring for each equipment in an operating plant. Due to these complexities, it's difficult for an operator to decide whether the condenser vacuum is maintained at its optimum value with varying impairing power generation. During a flexible operation scenario, it would severely impact plant efficiency. TCE has developed a real-time digital point solution that can help the operator to optimize their condenser performance. The digital point solution monitors condenser performance in real time. It can predict the optimum condenser pressure for different operating conditions. The DigitalPoint solution can provide performance deviations well in advance based on historical trends. It also provides early warning alerts for key parameters and diagnosis for performance deviations. The DigitalPoint solution can perform sensitivity analysis of each influential parameter. It also recommends remedial action for performance deviations of key parameters. The recommendations for the digital point solution, along with the actions of the operator, will lead to optimum plant operation. Tadek Consulting Engineers, your trusted partner for digital solutions. Stay tuned to this space to know more about our upcoming digital point solutions.
