June 2025 – Identifying and Capitalizing on Opportunities Coming Out of an Outage

You may ask, “What do we gain from addressing the Inputs and Fundamentals?” For STORM, our approach has served us well over many decades, and for those customers who have addressed and maintained these essentials, we have seen payback. Once improvements have been achieved, the key then is to maintain that same level of performance. It is not often we have every customer follow all of our 13 Essentials, but when the majority of them are addressed, the heat-rate improves.

May 2024 – Identifying and Capitalizing on Opportunities Coming Out of an Outage

When coming out of outages it is not uncommon to realize that issues have developed or are still present and have gotten worse from before the outage. The immediate cause of these issues is often not clear from just the control room indications. However, testing the system inputs can help reveal the issues. This testing includes airflow testing of the primary, secondary, and overfire air to ensure accurate flow measurement and control, as well as correct flow rates and proportions of air to each location. Mill performance testing involves assessing fineness, distribution, and air-to-fuel ratio. Flue gas testing is also conducted to review the temperature distribution and flue gas constituents, which can help identify problem burners, air-in leakage, or incorrect O2 indications that the unit is controlling from.    Click to find out more!

March 2024 – The Impact of Primary Airflow Measurement and Control on Safety, Reliability and Optimization

Airflow measurement plays a major role in the operation and control of all types of combustion systems. Storm has tested, calibrated, designed, and tuned nearly every type of airflow measurement device available. This summary provides an overview of the importance of accurate primary airflow measurement and control along with issues that arise when not tuned properly. Primary airflow serves multiple purposes in direct-fired pulverized coal systems. Click to find out more!

November 2023 – Identifying Air In-Leakage!

Air in-leakage is a subject all power plant personnel have heard about but often gets overlooked. Due to typically developing over a long span of time, the negative effects of air in-leakage are often not observed until it is too late, resulting in unit derate, increased slagging, and increased dry gas losses. This short newsletter aims to dive into demystifying air in-leakage by giving you the tools to understand what air in-leakage is and where it typically occurs, how to find it, and the benefits of reducing air in-leakage.

May 2023 – HVT Testing is Still Important!

HVT testing is a method to measure and optimize the performance of boilers by using water-cooled probes to measure flue gas temperature and composition at the furnace outlet. It can help plant operators to adjust the oxygen levels for combustion and reduce emissions, slagging, corrosion, and spray flows. HVT testing is still essential despite newer technologies because many boilers in the USA are old and have inaccurate oxygen indicators. HVT testing can also help with regulatory compliance and boiler longevity.

April 2023 – Testing Efficiency Improvement with SOAR System 

With emission limits growing ever tighter, efficient combustion is a necessity for most boilers to meet these lower limits. Well-tuned units are achievable when all equipment is kept in good operational condition. Many plants face a variety of tuning challenges, and it is important to keep the boilers operating efficiently and reliably. This becomes even more of a challenge when once base-loaded plants are required to chase load demand due to the increase of renewable power on the grid. When it comes to combustion tuning, STORM’s automated flue gas sampling system is a great tool. It allows for more firing combinations and tuning adjustments to be made and tested in shorter timespans over the traditional manual traverses of the flue gas after the furnace exit. What does this mean for you and your plant? With the improvement in testing efficiency, your dollars spent on testing go further. Our SOAR system allows for more testing to be done with fewer testing personnel, thus allowing for more tuning adjustments and combustion improvement opportunities for less money.

March 2023 – “Shock Wave” Impulse Cleaning Device Case Study 

Storm Technologies, Inc. has teamed up with PowerPlus Cleaning Systems to provide IMPULSE® cleaning technology to our customers in the utility and industrial industries. The impulse cleaner is an inexpensive, low-maintenance system that generates a “shock wave” by completing the combustion of ethylene gas.  The system was originally made to improve the cleaning effectiveness of standard sonic or acoustic horns and has been utilized for cleaning since 2006.  From PowerPlus’ experience and what we have seen firsthand, the system works best in the convection pass versus a radiant section where a molten, sticky, or “runny” slag may be present in many industrial/utility boiler arrangements.

Feb. 2023 – Storm’s Fabrication Capabilities And Outage Support 

Storm Technologies, Inc. is more than just testing crews pushing a probe in a boiler or pulling coal samples out of fuel lines.  We have the experience and the abilities to offer resourceful solutions from engineering, design, and fabrication to technical direction, testing, and tuning services for all general boiler and combustion system components. What begins as a conceptual design, often becomes cost-effective RESULTS for our customers.  We are fully committed to our mantra “QUALITY, SERVICE, RESULTS” and we are driven to all of our customers’ needs, from concept to completion.

Jan. 2023 – Periodic Monitoring can Prevent Forced Outages During Peak Demand

Storm Technologies, Inc. has long been an advocate for performance-driven maintenance programs. By conducting routine performance testing on the coal pulverizers and boilers, small problems can be identified and often addressed before they potentially cause the unit to be derated or even worse, forced into an unplanned outage. These unplanned forced outages often come during peak power demand periods when the price per MW is high and desired for the boiler to be operated at maximum capacity with a “hands-off” operating policy.