Why Steam Trap Monitoring?
All too often, steam traps are selected and installed, only to be forgotten. All steam traps fail with time. On average, plants without a regularly scheduled maintenance program experience failure in about 15-25 percent of their traps at any given time.
When failed traps are ignored, hundreds to thousands of dollars worth of steam can be wasted. The following calculator will give you the cost of steam losses associated with a failed trap.
Potential Leaking or Blow-Thru (steam trap fails open) Problems:
- Increased back pressure
- Reduced flow for surrounding steam traps
- Steam losses (monetary losses)
- Safety issues
- Environmental issues
Potential Cold Steam Traps (steam trap fails closed) Problems:
- Wet steam
- Water hammering
- Damaged turbine LP saturated steam stage
- Piping corrosion
- Erosion on valves, reducers, etc.
- “Stalling” or flooded heat exchanger
- Decrease in production
- Reduced heat transfer
- Batch process losses
- Thermal stress
There are three challenges for effective steam trap monitoring:
- Identifying a failure – What, when, and where?
- Evaluating the scope – How big of an impact?
- Measuring the impact – Value the tangible and intangible losses.
25+ year of experience in steam trap monitoring with 15+ year in wireless monitoring.