THE BENEFITS OF LEAK TESTING
 Valves and traps are expected to perform longer than ever before. Operating cycles are growing longer while outage durations are growing shorter. This means there is less time to fix valves and traps. Engineers and maintenance personnel are stretched thin with responsibility.
Maintenance budgets are often exhausted by fixing low-impact leaks while simultaneously overlooking the high-impact leaks. Or worse, fixing a leak that doesn’t really exist!
Every megawatt counts. Reducing operating costs is a necessity. Competition is looming and your plant must excel to compete.
Reduce Heat Rate & Fuel Costs
The key to maximizing net fuel savings is to identify the few valves that are causing most of the losses and only repair those valves and traps.
Our Cycle Isolation Leak Testing service is a proven method of reducing heat rate and fuel costs. Several of our clients have reported significant reductions in heat rate, many in excess of 1%, as a result of LDS recommended repairs.
Maximize Maintenance Budgets
Our valve leak testing and thermal loss analysis service identifies which valves to fix and in what order to fix them. It also identifies tight valves that can be removed from your plant’s maintenance list and budget.
 Avoiding the cost of attempting an unnecessary repair for one medium-sized control valve typically recovers the cost of the entire survey.
Avoiding the cost of attempting unnecessary repairs of only three or four smaller, high-energy drains typically recovers the cost of the entire survey. Ultimately, your outage duration will be shortened. Your plant will also experience reduced capital cost of the boiler and back-end equipment.
Increase Megawatt Output
Successfully identifying cycle isolation leak losses will significantly improve megawatt output. This is a critical step in meeting high customer demand and reducing the need to purchase replacement megawatts. The bottom line is increased output and reduced operating costs.
Reduce Down Time
Our clients turn to us to identify and eliminate equipment isolation leaks.
It is important that personnel are able to repair equipment such as heaters and pumps while online. Frequently, one or more isolation valves may be leaking. This results in the inability to repair the equipment online. The problem lies in identifying the leaking isolation valve(s).
We use a patented method of pinpointing which valve is unable to isolate. As a result, equipment repairs are successful and a forced outage is eliminated.
Meet or Exceed Purchase Power Agreement (PPA) Requirements
Our cycle isolation leak testing service ensures your plant’s operating efficiency is maximized during run time.
This is very important to plants that operate under purchase power agreements (PPA). These agreements require your site be able to produce when needed. And they must operate at or below a certain heat rate/efficiency level.
Failure to perform adequately results in penalty payments.
Reduce Emissions & Trade Allowance Costs
Our service provides a well documented, and low cost method, of reducing heat rate. Reduced heat rates lead to reduced emissions, including SO2, NOx, VOCs, CO2, and Mercury.
Title IV of the 1990 U.S. Clean Air Act requires individual plants to emit at or below a specific S02 emission rate (cap). In addition, your site may be subject to various regional caps on NOx and VOCs. President Barack Obama is aiming to set additional caps on carbon emissions to reduce greenhouse gases.
Failure to meet the specific cap guidelines leads to the necessity to secure trade allowances.
By using our service, you can minimize, and potentially avoid, the cost to secure allowances so as to meet cap requirements. In addition, if your site uses fewer allowances than mandated, it will gain the ability to sell pollution credits on the open market.
- “A 1% reduction in heat rate of a typical 750 MW unit, will reduce CO2 by approximately 26,000 tons/year. This represents a $520,000 savings at $20/ton CO2 emitted. The same unit will realize more than $680,000 in annual savings (at $1.50 per MMBtu).” See Reference.
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