TATA Power

I guess I'm strangely lucky this week...although the pile of work has reached the neck, I'm spending some time here. Today we had an industrial visit to a TATA Power generating plant and boy!!! was it great! this one was better than our last visit, which was to the nuclear reactor at Tarapur. So..her goes..

It wasn't difficult getting there; a simple bus ride from the college to Chembur and then another one to Mahol. Mahol happens to be a truly vast industrial area...en route to the plant we saw many other industries, most of them being petroleum refineries. We were guided around the plant by a pretty nice guy (Mr.N) who had a sound knowledge of power systems; after all, he had spent ten years there! The plant has been in the power scenario of Mumbai for over 60 years and has been a pioneer in a number of advances in the generation and transmission sector; they were the first to have a 500 MW plant in the country, that too, with an efficiency of about 38.5%(thermal). They're having one of the most efficient thermal plants in the country, a 120 MW with an efficiency of 50%. They've also been the first to have three-phase four conductor transmission towers..and they're still going on pretty well.

We began with a presentation about the plant; that's from where I got all the above mentioned stuff. This was followed by a trip to the photo gallery where the entire history of the plant was put in pictures, right from the first newspaper article about the TATAs entering into the power sector to the installation pictures of the turbine and generator room and all. Mr.N took turns explaining the models of the plants to batches of students. The best part came when we were taken to the actual control rooms. The real-time monitoring of the plant by SCADA systems was great, so was a screen showing the boiler internals. Most of the controls were almost parallel to what we saw at Tarapur; screens showing the temperature at various points of the boiler, the monitoring of the transformers, cables and what not!

Something that I can only describe as 'better than the best' was peeping inside the boiler to get a glimpse of the actual heart of the reactor-a huge sun-like ball of fire (this is were tis IV took the lead over the previous one). The small window we peeped through looked like Balrog's(from Lord Of the Rings) mouth; I later came to know that was at 1200 C!!. The plant has to maintain a negative pressure within the boiler; this basically means having a low pressure within the boiler so that the hot gases remain concentrated within a region. The water is circulated in helical pipes around the boiler so that a uniform heating is provided to the water within. The turbine section in itself was a marvel. This was the second turbine I've seen in my life; I don't have a clear picture of the first one I saw at Kadambarai a long time back.

The rest of the plant wasn't much exciting and the visit ended quickly. I think we missed some parts owing to some maintenance work. But the fascination of seeing equations come to reality, the glowing ball of fire, and many other things we saw aren't images that would get erased. Thank God that this company comes to our college; even if I were offered the job of a cleaner, I'd consider it...