Slag Monitoring Using Strain Gages at Georgia Power Plant Bowen

Georgia Power Plant Bowen is a 4 unit plant. Unit 1 is a 930 MW plant with a Combustion Engineering boiler. A slag monitoring system was installed on the leading side of the reheater pendant. Monitors were also installed on portions of the economizer. The key element of the system is strain gages that are installed on the rods that hang the pendant and economizer from the building steel. Monitoring of the gages was done during the restart of the unit from a major maintenance outage. Data from the system will be presented. The amount of deposits and their location is the intended output from the system and this data will be presented. The long range goal of the system is automatic operation of soot blowers based on the output from the monitoring system.