With a recent post I made the claim that the power industry is needlessly wasting several billion euro each and every year. The calculation, although well founded, didn’t give an individual plant manager the real feeling for the actual potential of the benefits from inlet air filtration upgrade so we felt we needed to make a simple tool for the plant managers to quantify the gains.

After a lot of hard work with our web-designers (thank you Sami and Matias) we made a simplified version of our detailed engineering calculator to give first a rough idea of the GT inlet air filtration upgrade benefits – the increase in output and reduction in fuel cost – with just simple input data in no time.

Initially we thought the tool would serve as our sales team´s tool in customer visits but now we have decided to release it for all GT users to really promote the general understanding that the billion euro annual waste is very real and it affects all GT´s operating with F-class filtration.

Yes, the calculator is making some assumptions and yes, it doesn’t give you three decimals' answer like our engineering version does – but on the other hand, it only asks you to enter four very basic parameters:

1. GT output (MW)
2. Operation hours per year           
3. Number of annual off-line washing
4. Off-line washing gain (MW)

The only number you may have to look up should be the off-line washing gain, which is also the most critical value of all, as it is a clear indicator of your filtration efficiency (and a direct indicator of the health of your gas turbine).

Off-line washing gain is a direct indicator of the health of your gas turbine

If you are doing just one off-line washing per year, typically before or after the annual maintenance period, just look at your GT output before the shutdown and then after the shutdown. The GT output increase (MW) you have after the outage is your off-line washing gain.

As a guideline, I would expect the gain to be something between 2 - 5% if you are still running with F-class filtration. And remember that the higher the off-line washing gain, the lower filtration efficiency you currently have, and the higher benefits your plant will gain with a filtration upgrade.

With Eagle Filters E-class filtration, we are seeing annual degradation drop below 0,2%

We actually tested the calculator at a recent Power Plant Management and Generation Summit (thank you Marcus Evans for the excellent event) and the response from plant managers was great (“REALLY, THAT MUCH? NOW you have my attention…”).

Can you afford NOT to spend 1-minute to calculate your wasted potential – click on the link below to try our calculator for yourself:

eaglefilters.fi/calculator

So please, give our calculator a try. Once you realize the benefits you could have from a filtration upgrade, the Eagle Filters sales team is more than happy to find you the filtration solution improving your plant output and reducing your fuel costs.

Author: Pertti Sundberg