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Power (15-Sep-04)
Boiler waterside deposition has long been recognized as a cause of
boiler tube failures. A widely used way to identify the amount and
chemical composition of deposition in a suspected area of the
furnace is to extract a tube section and measure its deposit weight
density (DWD). This test method is less than ideal, for two reasons.
It is destructive, requiring the removal and replacement of a tube
that may be in a critical area of the furnace. And operators rightfully
question the validity of considering a single tube specimen indicative
of the entire furnace's deposition buildup. How much information,
they ask, can you get from a single tube when deposition might be
occurring on its neighbors at a very different rate?
To answer this question, Nalco Co. (Naperville, Ill.) last year
conducted an extensive set of DWD analyses on the lower furnace of
an industrial heat-recovery boiler. Rather than pick one or a few
tubes for laboratory analysis, an attempt was made to determine
tube DWD values across an extended area of the furnace and at
multiple elevations on the same tubes. The goal of the study was to
gain more insight into the deposition process.
No deposit, no return
Mild steel is the material most commonly used for steam generating
tubes in industrial boilers. Its heat transfer and thermal stability
benefits have been recognized for many years. But failures of mildsteel tubes can result if waterside deposits accumulate and cause
metal temperatures to exceed 850Fa process called long-term
overheat failure. See Figure 2 for a detailed illustration and
explanation of the effects under heat transfer conditions.
There are two points worth mentioning here. One is that the primary
danger of a waterside deposit is an overheat failure, not the loss of
heat transfer efficiency and the associated fuel value lost. Many large
industrial boilers have sufficient heat transfer surface area so that
the heat not collected in the radiant zone does get into the water
phase at some other part of the boiler. Accordingly, it is the
possibility of tube failure that we are concerned with here, not fuel
efficiency.
Although it is also known that deposition may induce a number of
corrosion failure mechanisms, the primary issue is overheating
failures. Even a moderate temperature rise due to internal surface
deposition can promote fireside corrosion and tube wall thinning in
heat-recovery boilers. Guidelines have been developed to help
determine the need for chemical cleaning based on the amount of
deposition measured on the hot side internal surface of tubes, and
those guidelines depend on operating pressure and the type of boiler.
The second point is that all deposits do not retard heat transfer
equally. One typical type of waterside deposit is formed mostly of
metal oxides, which are returned to the boiler in the condensate
flow. If a makeup water quality excursion results in a silica-bearing
deposit, the resulting elevation in tube metal temperature can be
much higher for the same deposit mass or thickness. Even as we
quantify the amount of deposit present as a DWD value, it is also
necessary to consider the deposit composition to be sure that a
substantially different resistance to heat transfer is not occurring.
Knowing the composition of the deposit also is essential to the
development of an appropriate cleaning procedure to successfully
remove the scaleif required.
Test setup
Testing was conducted on the No. 2 heat-recovery boiler at the
Smurfit-Stone Mill in Panama City, Fla. The 30-year-old unit is a
Combustion Engineering V2R design that typically operates at 450
psi and generates 375,000 lb/hr of steam. According to the mill, the
4. Deposition rates on the right wall panel were also consistent. That
tends to confirm that a single tube specimen is indeed indicative of
deposition across the entire furnace. Source: Nalco Co.
The deposit layers on the internal surfaces were generally thin, hard,
and dark-colored. A thin, tenacious oxide layer was present
everywhere beneath the deposit layers. Some samples were covered
by friable, spotty red deposits in a few places. Material on the
internal surfaces of some tube samples was analyzed using a
scanning electron microscope equipped with an energy dispersive
spectrometer for compositional analysis and by X-ray diffraction for
compound identification. The results indicated that the deposits
primarily consisted of iron as iron oxides. Some locations, especially
on the cold sides of the tubes, had areas with appreciable
contributions of copper in the deposits, as elemental copper and
copper oxide.
In addition to chemical analysis on the internal surfaces of some
samples, metallographic specimens were removed from these
sections and prepared for microscopic examinations. The
microstructures of the tube metal on all specimens did not show
evidence of overheating.
The internal surfaces of some samples were covered in places by
moderately thick layers of deposits that consisted of agglomerated
elemental copper and iron oxide particles (Figure 5). Other samples
had deposit layers containing mottled oxide particles, but no copper
particles (Figure 6). The surfaces of all samples were covered by a
very thin, dense magnetite layer in most places. The thickness of the
oxide layer was typically less than 0.0005 inches.