Calibration helps a power plant in maintaining or even improving safety, as well as in meeting national and international standards. However, calibration is also a matter of profitability. By using high-accuracy calibration equipment, the accuracy of vital measurements can be maintained at required levels and plants can increase their annual power production capability.

Power and Energy Operations

Electric, natural gas, oil, and other energy meters directly inf luence revenue. Because of rising energy costs, power and energy operations carefully scrutinize these devices to ensure that they accurately account for their energy and bill correctly. Calibration issues that arise in the power and energy industries are also similar to those faced in power and energy consumer industries. Although not directly billable, internal energy consumption and its allocation can make or break a seemingly viable product. Proper instrument calibration helps ensure that these measurements are performed accurately, especially because annual billing can exceed 1 billion US dollars in many plants.

Instrumentation is used to measure energy flow within power and energy operations in order to monitor and improve operations. While these instruments are not directly used for billing purposes, their proper operation is often key to identifying and preventing energy losses that can have large economic consequences. Failure to properly calibrate these instruments can lead to signif icant economic consequences.

Instruments typically calibrated in power plants include transmitters, switches, gauges, transducers, frequency devices and pulse counters to ensure proper operation and safety. Failure to properly calibrate these devices can significantly affect process operation. Calibrating instruments properly in a timely manner is an important aspect of ensuring the environmental integrity of the process that can reduce the number and severity of environmental issues.

Calibration Requirements for Increasing Plant Productivity and Safety

Accurate measurements can allow increased energy production. Therefore, high-accuracy calibrators such as the Beamex® MC5 Multifunction Calibrator, have a significant role in improving plant productivity. For instance, reducing the measurement uncertainty in a nuclear power plant can potentially increase electrical production up to nearly 2 percent (see CNA case story).

The economic consequence of this seemingly small power increase typically increases revenues by many millions of dollars because the total value of power and energy flows can easily be over a billion dollars per year. Therefore, seemingly small measurement errors caused by poor calibration techniques can potentially result in major revenue losses. With these improved measurements comes the additional requirement of maintaining calibration equipment and techniques that are comparable with the improved instrument performance with traceability to national and international standards, such as NIST, ISO 9001 and ISO 17025.

Safety is based upon never exceeding established operating limits such as reactor power and cooling capacity. A byproduct of improved calibration is an improvement in safety and fewer problems because instruments periodically calibrated to more accurate standards reduce the risk associated with these measurements. In addition, improved calibration standards can be used to detect instrument degradation sooner.

Power and Energy Industry Calibration

Field calibration allows the in-situ calibration of instruments that measure electrical parameters such as voltage, current and power – some of which may be used for billing purposes in a power plant. The performance of natural gas and oil flow measurement systems can also influence billing. In particular, the calibration of flowmeters used to check the custody transfer flowmeters is important. Small variations between these flowmeters can result in large billing differences and could indicate a problem with the custody transfer flowmeter. Field calibrators allow these calibrations to be performed accurately and more efficiently, especially when the instrument is installed with poor personnel access.

Many electricity, steam, cogeneration, ethanol, bio-diesel, ref inery and other types of energy plants use these measurements to develop process heat and material balances that describe their processes. Heat and material balances can be instrumental in locating opportunities that can save millions of dollars of energy. For example, increased steam flow to a heat exchanger indicates that either the steam trap on the heat exchanger leaks (wasting steam), or that the process changed (wasting steam) and needs to be investigated to reduce steam consumption. Field calibrators help ensure that these instruments operate properly and accurately, quantifying energy savings. In addition, instruments that are regularly and accurately calibrated often tend to improve plant safety and reduce the probability of equipment damage.

Further, automated por table calibrators can improve the calibration process by automating the generation of the transmitter inputs and the recording of the transmitter measurements. This makes the calibration process much less time-consuming and improves the accuracy with which data is collected by reducing the probability of human error.

Expensive qualification requirements often preclude the opening of transmitters in nuclear power plants. In these applications, the calibration process can be performed faster and more accurately with an automated calibrator as compared to using existing manual calibration techniques.

The Beamex® MC5 Multifunction Calibrators and the Beamex® CMX calibration software form an integrated, automated calibrat ion system. Calibrations performed using automated field calibrators and calibration software with electronic documentation, result in more uniform calibrations that are less prone to human error. This automated calibration process is faster and more complete than the manual process. Aside from being more accurate, it also frees up significant amounts of time for the technician to perform other work. The integrated system with communicating calibrators and calibration software allow also easy upload of calibrations to a PC and produce easy-to-read calibration certificates showing the accuracy of the instrument. It also allows the ability to search for instruments that are due for calibration.