The air ingress due to the condensate trap's malfunction is considered as the "culprit", since the vacuum in the surface condenser restored when we throttled the block ball valve upstream the trap (of course at the cost of condensate back up in the gland steam condenser). Anyway for now we have replaced the trap but i believe that the condensate recovery savings doesn't worth the risk of future turbine shutdowns (for the same reason). Moreover checking the design of the second steam turbine operating at our plant, i saw that the gland steam condensates are thrown to the drain (through a seal loop which is not applicable in this turbine due to space limitations).

Unfortunately because the turbine is very old (built and installed in 60s) we don't have detailed material balances and specifications (but i will come up with some calculations tomorrow that i will be back at work).

In any case i think the article you attached (thank you for that) revealed a weakness of the proposed modification (the slope of the downward piping).

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