How to reasonably start up and shut down the steam turbine

Li Zhongyuan Abstract The reasonable methods of starting up and shutting down steam turbine are a main subject for study to ensure turbogenerator economic efficiency and safety. All measures of reducing potential safety hazards during the process of start-up and considering frugal operation are based on theoretical analysis and the experience, and with a purpose of reasonably shortening the start-up duration. This paper makes a broad exploration on optimizing start-up and shut-down of steam turbine ,and on the parameter control during rotor-driving and warming up periods, the start of pumps and flange bolt heating units, as well as the differential expansion control during the moment of shutdown,etc. KeywordsSteam turbine; start-up; shut-down Starting up steam turbine is a heating process. The purpose of heating is to keep each position of steam turbine obtaining sufficient preheating, decreasing temperature contrast of cylinder flange internal and external wall, decreasing rotor surface and center temperature contrast, thus minising metal internal stress, and making flange cylinder and rotor expension,assuring internal activity clearance of steam turbine. Shutting down steam turbine is a reverse process. When we start up steam turbine, we often encounter the problem that metal temperature raises quickly or slowly. To some extent, it affects the safe operation of generating set, and causes that the network units can not be connected to the grid. During the moment of shut-down, it often appears that the negative differential expansion constantly rises, until it increases more than the alarm value, and sometimes approaches protective value of tripping, which seriously affects the safe operation of the unit. 1 start-up of steam turbine 1.1 Warming up the tube wall Warming up the tube wall is on purposes of conducting heat evenly and preventing excessive temperature rise, which causes the internal wall of Pipe tee has a significant thermal stress, so that pipeline and its accessory have a crack or deformation. Therefore, the low-pressure pipe warming must gradually increase steam pressure based on the speed of the metal wall temperature increase; In addition, the speed of the wall temperature increase is related to the flow of steam pipe, and excessive steam flow will heat pipe components intensely, so we should pay great
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attention to adjusting the total steam valves or keeping drain-valve open in order to control the steam flow when we warm the low-pressure pipe. We should strictly control the speed of temperature and pressure rise. 1.2 start-up of pumps We should postpone start-up time for saving the station-service power. The condensate Pump is an important auxiliary equipment, its power consumption is great. The start-up of the condensate pump can be said to be a waste of electricity before sending steam into the seal, but when we send steam into the seal in order to creat vacuum and protect the heater, the pump should be run just-in-time. The generator cooling water pumps, just starts before rushing to turn, makes the water get uniformly into generator rotator and stator. Premature starting is meaningless, because generator coil cannot produce heat before operation with grid, it neednt be cooled. If we make the water get into generator coil after rushing to turn, two unfavorable factors will appear: first, rotator shaft seal filler will be damaged easily;secondly,water gets into generator unevenly, that will make generator rotator produce larger centrifugal force.Therefore,generator cooling system should be operated at the moment before rushing to turn. 1.3 start-up of the heater Random start-up of the high and low pressure heater can make the heater be uniformly heated. It is beneficial to prevent the outlet of copper tube from water leakage, and to prevent the heater from deformation because of the larger thermal stress. The steam extraction pipeline that connects the heater joins low cylinder, if the heater starts up randomly, that means adding cylinder drainage point, and makes the temperature difference of upper and lower cylinder decrease. But we maybe encounter the condition of the lower cylinder temperature is higher than the upper in the turbine start-up process. Taking Yumen Power Station 2# turbogeneration for example,This condition often appears in the stage of low-load warming up, it enormously extends the warming up time, and the temperature maybe exceed specified value(50),in this time ,we should shut down the turbine, then restart it when the temperature goes down, and properly prolong the warming-up time. To all appearances, the high and low pressure heater cannot be started up in this condition. So start-up of the high and low pressure heater should rather base on concrete condition than uniformly adopt the method of random start-up. 1.4 running of the flange bolts heating device The proper running of flange bolts heating device is conducive to control cylinders expansion, to reduce the differential expansion and improve the rate of increase in load. The part that first contacts the steam, its metal temperature will rise faster. and the metal temperature will rise, so the heat inside and outside of the cylinder flange is uneven and easily
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produce a greater thermal stress in the upper and lower cylinder, the cylinder flange inside and outside wall, flange and bolts. This kind of deformation causes to dynamic and static friction, and to damage equipments. So we should start the flange bolts heating device according to cylinder and flange temperature condition. 1.5 controlling the differential expansion Because the differential expansion range is smaller( 1.5 4mm),it easily appear that the differential expansion approaches specified value in the turbine start-up process, we often adopt the method of extending the warming up time or decreasing steam parameter to reduce he differential expansion. Apparently, the method of extending the warming up time is not conducive to economical turbine start-up. Practice proves that the method of adjusting the condenser vacuum to control the differential expansion is easier. Specific method:openning damage-vacuum valve can decrease vacuum effectively, the vacuum decrease will affect the turbine inlet steam quantity and exhaust steam temperature, nevertheless, exhaust steam temperature increase will improve cylinder expansion, and this condition can effectively control the positive direction rise of differential expansion, that means turbine should rush to turn by lower vacuum, this method can be beneficial to control the differential expansion and to warm up turbine. 2 shut-down of steam turbine Shut-down process should be in strict accordance with the rules of order to reduce the load, the load will be reduced with the speed about 5 MW load each 5 min, because the load reduced quickly, which easily makes the negative differential expansion become larger and turbine metal temperature drop too quickly. When turbine rotational speed attends zero, we should keep water quantity in condenser, to prevent cylinder exhaust steam temperature rises irregularly. 3 Conclusions Any reasonable start-up or shut-down process is from practice. The foregoing statement about optimizing operation is mainly focused on being reasonable to shorten the start-up time, reduce security risks of running decommissioning and other aspects. Practice has proved that these methods are effective. Reference: Wang Zhiwei.Turbine operation technology [M]beijing;cepp ,2007.