Performance of feed pumps is crucial to the operation of thermal power plants. Thanks to an incentivebased partnership service agreement between Sulzer Pumps and the South African utility Eskom, the availability of Eskom’s power plants has been steadily increasing.

Pump performance increased due to a long-term service partnership

During the late 1970s, failures in boiler feed pump systems resulted in significant availability losses to the utility industry worldwide. Also power stations of the South African utility Eskom have suffered from such incidents. Due to the significant effects of boiler feed pump performance on overall plant operation, Eskom Generation and Sulzer decided to enter into a partnering agreement in 1993, with the goal to jointly improve performance. Since the start of the service alliance, the 2 partners improved the pump availability to over 99.9%.

Sulzer Technical Review, Issue 02/2008
Author(s): Johan Cadle, Tony Cattaert, Willem van der Westhuizen
Division: Sulzer Pumps

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