The Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA) operates two liquefied natural gas (LNG) refueling stations. Each station has the capacity to refuel two full size transit buses simultaneously at a fill rate of 60 gallons per minute. This is accomplished using a positive displacement cryogenic pump submerged inside the LNG bulk storage vessel. Since the stations were originally constructed, a new design of the cyrogenic LNG pump has been developed to correct several deficiencies in the original design.
151126.00
OCTA purchased one new pump of the new design. This allows OCTA to replace existing pumps one at a time and send them out to be updated to the new design without significantly impacting bus refueling operations. The replacement and retrofit of the obsolete pumps is expected to not only improve reliability, but also increase fuel flow rates enabling a greater number of OCTA buses to be refueled nightly.
The objective of this project was to upgrade the LNG pumps in the existing OCTA refueling stations to a new design. The intent was to eliminate current pump deficiencies and ensure continued successful operation of the refueling stations.
The new LNG pump is working per specification; this will help ensure continued successful refueling operations for OCTA's fleet of LNG transit buses.
This project has been successfully implemented. Although several initial issues were encountered at pump delivery and ispection, the issues were minor and were corrected by the vendor.