News & Views, Volume 49 | Attemperator Monitoring with Wireless Sensors: Risk and Cost Reduction in Real Time
By: Jason Van Velsor, Matt Freeman and Ben Ruchte
Installed sensors and continuous online monitoring are revolutionizing how power plants manage assets and risk by facilitating the transformation to condition-based maintenance routines. With access to near real-time data, condition assessments, and operating trends, operators have the opportunity to safely and intelligently reduce operations and maintenance costs and outage durations, maximize component lifecycles and uptime, and improve overall operating efficiency.
But not all data is created equal and determining what to monitor, where to monitor, selecting appropriate sensors, and determining data frequency are all critical decisions that impact data value. Furthermore, sensor procurement, installation services, data historian/storage, and data analysis are often provided by separate entities, which can lead to implementation challenges and disruptions to efficient data flow.
Plant engineers must often answer ‘what damage is this piece of equipment susceptible to, and what can we do about it?’ or ‘how much longer can this component continue operating’? 
High Energy Piping systems, including main steam and hot reheat piping, are typically very reliable and can often operate trouble-free for decades.
Structural Integrity and GP Strategies recently announced an agreement to bring SI’s technology for calculating, tracking, and trending life consumption of piping and boiler components to GP Strategies EtaPRO real-time monitoring platform (Press release here).