Seen from above... in HDR

Seen from two decks up: the main steamvalves of the boiler of unit EC 20.
At the other side of the boiler there are two more, so in total four of these huge valves.
They are driven by ROTORK actuators and when the actuator fails, we have to do it manually.
In that case we pull the handle in the middle to engage the manual control and turn the handwheel. The pressure under it can rise up to 180 bar. Sometimes it happened that the stuffing blew out during start-up on opening the valve. When the valve is fully open, the actuator stops. To stop the leak we had to open the valve more (beyond normal open position) manually. Each valve has a so-called "backseat" and by opening the valve more we reach that seat and stop the steam from coming out. That sounds like a rather simple operation but it was a rather bad job, surrounded by steam, a tremendous noise and immense heat....

Better in LARGE...