February 2002

Emission Reduction and Baghouse Optimisation

Fibrothetford Ltd is the world's third poultry litter fired Power Station based at Thetford in Norfolk. The plant burns over 400,000 tonnes of poultry litter per year, to produce 38.5MW of electricity, enough for a town of around 93,000 homes. The plant is Europe's largest producer of electricity from renewable sources, as well as the largest project to come to fruition under the UK Government's Non-Fossil Fuel Obligation, which provides support for renewable electricity generation. The process has major environmental advantages over other methods of generation - it is clean and environmentally friendly.

Fibrothetford's decision to install filter management equipment was driven by their commitment to improve plant efficiency and in particular to ensure their baghouse functionality could be controlled and maintained to operate at it's optimum. Fibrothetford were looking for a system which would be easy to operate, incorporating a package for remote monitoring and reporting to indicate any deterioration in filter performance to allow scheduled preventative maintenance. It was also very much in line with the Company's policy on maintaining their contribution to the environment which has been recognised by it's winning of a number of environmental awards.

A separate optical monitoring system had previously been installed to monitor total particulate emissions from the main stack, however, the filter configuration was such that it would be impractical to use to locate faults in the baghouse. Due to the unique conditions in the baghouse - around 25% humidity, it was decided to implement a system based on PCME's DM330 probe based sensors connected together in a network. These sensors were fitted with PCME's unique patented fully insulated probes essential for use in high humidity applications.

The Windows-based software package, "DustManager" was used for monitoring the performance of the baghouse. The software configures and controls the network of sensors from a central PC and conveniently displays and manages data from the network. The PC screen clearly shows the status of the baghouse at a glance and enables reports to be generated. Dust data is displayed in real time for each individual sensor and easy access to historical data and maintenance logs is provided.

Steve Brown, Operations Engineer at Fibrothetford said "Since the installation, the system has proved its value as an effective, predictive maintenance tool. Previously it could take between 8 and 24 hours to find faults and up to 3 hours work on each cell to identify broken bags. Now the efficiency of the baghouse can be controlled and maintained to operate at its optimum and having the capability to identify the cell in which the suspect fabric filter is fitted, down time and costs are notably reduced. It also assists in planning both for rework and in budgeting for replacement parts. Particulate emissions are also significantly reduced by the systems ability to quickly detect problems at an early stage."