ELB Engineering Services (Pty) Ltd (ELB) has been successful in assisting the Eskom Medupi Power Station in bringing the dust handling plant under control over the past 5 months. ELB was requested to assist with the operations and maintenance of Unit 2 & 3 dust handling plant and ash storage Silo 1 since January 2019, during a time when the Eskom systems were under pressure.
Due to a number of technical and maintainability issues, outside the control of Eskom, both parties worked closely together to overcome these challenges.
ELB’s operation and maintenance teams in conjunction with Eskom managed to contain the dust leaks and replace faulty equipment with minimum outages of the 2 units to ensure supply of power to the grid. The plants have largely been returned to a stable condition and any dust emissions are repaired immediately, ensuring a clean plant and negating any health and safety issues, therefore availability and performance of the plant has increased to a reasonable level.
The success of the operation and maintenance team is mainly due to two key elements. ELB’s maintenance team was led by a team of ELB engineers who have extensive experience in dust handling systems. These engineers work with the maintenance crews at the “coal face” to ensure that the correct work is prioritised and to ensure quick and correct decisions are taken.
They provide suggestions on how to optimise the system’s performance and continuously review work procedures which has reduced time taken to do maintenance tasks. The second key element has been the attitude of the team and their counterparts from Eskom Medupi.
This joint team have the common goal of ensuring that the units can provide the maximum amount of power onto the grid. The collective teams have contributed to ensure that the work can be executed timeously and that the crews have what they require to execute the work.
Now that the plant is in a more stable condition ELB has implemented a preventative maintenance strategy which will help increase availability and performance of the plant, thereby allowing the units to continue putting power on the grid without any substantial delays from the dust handling plants for Units 2 & 3.
ELB Engineering Services is an internationally recognised technology driven holistic solutions provider to the mining, power, port, construction and industrial sectors. This is achieved through ELB generated innovation, supply of equipment and technology from our world class partners, in-house developed expertise and integration of the services and products from the ELB Group of companies.
Contact: Cornel Charlton – cornelc@elb.co.za – Tel: +27 (0)11 772-1509