In the past 3 years PROMECON have been involved in extensive Baseline- and Performance Testing in the so called Blackfox Project of the GDF owned utility ECL of Chile. Blackfox is a project to make 6 coal fired units at the power stations Mejillones and Tocopilla compliant with new environmental regulations of Chile in terms of NOx and particulate emissions whilst maintaining thermal efficiency. The boilers were retrofitted by various OEMs with new burners, new baghouse filters and ID-Fans as well as new desulfurization units. ECL selected PROMECON to be the sole main testing and verification party for the complete baseline and performance testing according to EN 12952 – 15 in order to assess their compliance with the new regulations of all 6 units.

Beside the baseline and performance testing PROMECON´s scope was the online measurement and tuning of coal mass flow distribution, air flows into the boiler, gas flows out of the boiler and air heaters as well as unburned carbon in fly ash. On top of that PROMECON did a full thermal boiler simulation of the furnace, the water walls as well as super-, reheater and economizer. Furthermore CFDs for the most critical parts of the air and flue gas paths were done. By this not only thermal efficiency could be tracked but also ID fan performance, air heater losses, slagging and boiler cleanliness could be verified so that ECL got verification of their project targets before and after every boiler conversion. PROMECON had various teams of their specialists in Germany as well as right in the Atacama Desert in the North of Chile at the ECL sites to support and execute all performance tests. ECL have expressed their full satisfaction with the technology, measurement systems as well as extensive services and consulting of PROMECON. PROMECON would like to thank ECL for their trust and continued support in this project.