A commercial power plant facing increasingly stringent emissions requirements had a problem with a solution that created another problem. The emissions control system was working, but it was generating acids that precipitated during cold-weather startups and were damaging the air preheater.
The fix: reactivate an abandoned glycol heating system that would keep exhaust gas temperatures above the acid-gas dew point. The question: could the existing auxiliary steam system, spanning four aging coal boilers, actually supply it?
That question involved compressible flow across a complex network of headers, letdowns, and crosstie piping, under multiple unit trip scenarios. As Kiewit Mechanical Engineer Ryan Mathes put it, the complexity made doing this by hand in any reasonable timeframe essentially impossible.
Kiewit used Datacor Arrow's Scenario Manager to build a base model of the as-designed system, then ran child scenarios across varying unit configurations, steam supply conditions, and crosstie sizes. The model revealed that the existing 6-inch crosstie was undersized. A 10-inch replacement, paired with upgraded letdowns, would be sufficient.
The result: the plant owner had documented, simulation-backed justification to approve a capital upgrade, redirect budget to pipe routing and support work, and move toward compliance with confidence rather than conjecture.
Download the case study to see the model outputs and scenario analysis that made the decision possible.