A steam data/meter verification and troubleshooting technique has been developed and implemented to help determine erroneous data in the steam balance report and identify faulty meters or errors in data transmission. This includes an analytical technique which utilizes redundancy in existing steam flow measurements and a diagnostic tree which uses the result of physical checking of the suspect flow meters/data in a sequential manner until fault diagnosis is completed.
The important features of this technique are (1) it is based on the concept of diagnosibility rather than blindly applying an analytical technique to identify faulty meter(s), (2) the ability to identify all the probable sets of faulty flow meters, (3) the corrected flow data are available once the faulty flow meter(s) are determined, (4) relatively small amount of calculation is needed, and (5) a diagnostic tree is used to guide physical checking of the suspect flow meter(s) until diagnosis is completed.