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For full details and to register your place, please visit the event website.
Please briefly explain your role, involvement, and experience with fired power boilers and EfW
Pal Galik (PG): I am a Power Industry expert at Emerson Flow Control Valve business unit. In my role I’m visiting Power plants Europewide, analysing issues and solve problems, with key control valve applications. Final control elements have tremendous influence on Safety, Reliability and Efficiency of the whole plant, even if it not almost fully understood. It is extremely important to drill down and understand the root causes of problems, symptoms, like frequent damage, seat leakage, difficult controllability, pipe cracks, forced outage during start-up, just to name some, to address those and create a valve which solve those once and for all (long time).
What is the top challenge facing your industry at present?
PG: It is always a challenge to identify, what went wrong with the installed valve, identify the differences between the original design data and reality. It requires proper cooperation with the end-users and this is time and effort consuming and sometimes a request for a valve replacement arrive in the very last minute. That is why I feel very important to be prepared to identify those early warning signs.
How would you say your industry has evolved over the past five years?
PG: The physics which acting on the control valve obviously hasn’t changed, but as manufacturing technologies involve now we can introduce solutions which might were there in theory earlier, but for instance before the additive manufacturing technology could be properly executed. There are significant development on the instrumentation of a control valve, which provide ever developing tools to monitor the valve health, behaviour and the communications between the DCS and the valve itself.
What will you be presenting at the 2023 ‘Boiler User Group’ and how will this benefit participants?
PG: My presentation title is: Control Valves, more than Heavy Metal. This presentation introduces control valve performance and its impact on Boiler KPIs. The audience will gain understanding about the control loop and the role of the final control element in it. Learn how the accuracy of a valve can be understood and what are the key point to consider when it should be improved. Some example applications will be highlighted with first hand experiences from previous process reviews. No sales speech, focusing on applications and symptoms and approach to address, rather than particular control valve technologies.
Why is it important for engineers and industry to come together at this event and share best practice?
PG: I think such events are greatly helpful to tackle with day-to-day challenges, learning from each other’s experiences as well as have a peek to the future directions.
The IMechE Boiler User Group 2023 will take place on 15-16 November 2023 in Nottingham.
The user group will address issues relating to all aspects of the design, operation, maintenance and integrity of boilers (fired boiler plant associated with power generation or industrial process steam). This will cover a wide scope of plant areas and fuels, including waste, biomass, fossil and other fuels.
For full details and to register your place, please visit the event website.