Cooling Towers
Streamline maintenance and maintain throughput by analyzing the health of your refinery’s cooling towers in real time.
Streamline maintenance and maintain throughput by analyzing the health of your refinery’s cooling towers in real time.
Cooling tower issues can cause production constraints, unsuitable water quality, hydrocarbon leaks, and the resulting costs and dangers. Emerson’s cooling tower monitoring and analysis solution replaces infrequent manual readings with online insight into the health and performance of your cooling tower, allowing you to detect and address issues that could lead to lost cooling capacity, asset damage, or higher energy use.
Reduce unplanned downtime caused by asset reliability issues
Makeup and blowdown cycles are critical to water quality and cooling efficiency. Low cycle rates can lead to poor water quality that causes fouling, corrosion, and potential health safety issues for personnel. High cycle rates can cause excessive wear on equipment and higher chemical and makeup water usage and costs. By allowing conductivity-based water quality control, Emerson’s asset monitoring solutions can optimize the cycle rate, minimizing operating costs, and ensuring good water quality.
Excessive vibration and high bearing temperature can result in premature bearing wear and mechanical seal damage, leading to pump failure or fan trips. Shutdowns of cooling tower fans and supply pumps can disrupt throughput and decrease cooling capacity. Emerson’s vibration sensors and machinery health software provide an integrated solution that can help you detect early on-set of premature bearing wear signal and prevent slowdowns and shutdowns.
Leaks from heat exchanger tubes can leak into the circulating water and be released into the environment. Emerson’s transmitters and monitoring solutions can sense liquid hydrocarbons on the surface of water, allowing you time to take corrective action before leaks become worse.
As water evaporates in cooling towers, solids can settle on heat exchange surfaces, causing reduction in heat transfer. Corrosion of equipment can also reduce heat transfer. Effective monitoring of scaling and corrosion can enable increase heat transfer efficiency and reduce energy costs. Emerson’s AMS Machinery Manager Software also recommends the appropriate number of cooling tower units required to meet cooling water demands in the process based on different ambient conditions.
Cooling towers present several potential health, environmental, and safety risks, from the growth of hazardous biological growth in the water supply to the potential release of flammable hydrocarbons. Emerson’s asset monitoring solutions allow you to ensure proper water quality thus mitigating potential health safety incidents. Automatic monitoring also allows personnel to avoid making dangerous manual field readings in icy or inclement weather.
