Advances in steam quality monitoring systems in power plants

Online and reliable monitoring of steam quality in power plants is of great importance in smart grids today since it can mitigate eventual erosions and buildups which may occur in associated metal equipment such as pipes and steam turbine. This in turn causes a substantial reduction in the amount of energy produced by the steam generator. This chapter presents state of the art online and offline sensing techniques used for steam quality monitoring in power plants. This includes optical, orifice, swirling, vortex, conductive, and PH meters. While offline monitoring techniques, such as isokinetic sampling technique are still widely deployed for steam monitoring mainly because of the relative simplicity, online monitoring techniques offer the possible to identify transient steam purity conditions. It also allows the prediction of future states of either the steam turbine or the steam quality and hence offers the possibility of effective preventive actions.