The quality of the water used to produce the steam in the boiler will have a profound effect on meeting the objectives such as safe operation, maximum combustion and heat transfer efficiency, minimum maintenance and long working life.
The steam boiler in the packaging plant is mainly used in the heating process before the raw paper is made into cardboard. In brief, it is using steam which contains no water in the drying process to improve the production efficiency and product quality of packaging cartons. As a result, it has high requirements for the steam and steam boiler, such as temperature, water content, rated evaporation capacity per unit time, etc., which are important parameters in the boiler selection.
Here load means, amount of steam drawn from the boiler. So when the load increases, the specific volume of the steam in the boiler increases reducing the pressure. This inturn demands for more feed water and more amount of fuel to be burnt. So, for any boiler there will be a feed water level control system put in place to measure the water level in drum. As and when the level of water in the drum reduces, the controller sends a signal to the feed water pump to start and stops when the desired water level is reached. This way the steam generation continues to maintain the desired pressure.
A water level sensor fail on a steam boiler is extremely dangerous. The low water cut of should be tested daily. If the sensor fails the boiler could turn all the water into steam, leaving the boiler dry. Without water in the boiler the flame from the burner would heat up the heating surface to extreme temperatures and would crack and damage the inside of the boiler. But that’s not the dangerous part. If water added to boiler while it is extremely hot. Once water touches the extremely hot heating service, water would immediately start to evaporate into steam. When water evaporates it expands 18x it’s original size. The boiler would explode from the sudden increase in pressure from the inside. Some in some cases, boilers that have exploded out of a building and have landed 100s of feet away.
Normally a boiler is provided with two independent sensors for emergency low water level burner cut-outs. So this would never happen. However, if it does, don't take any chances! Shut off the burners immediately!
Before you start raising the level in the boiler you have to find out if any part of the furnace walls has been overheated. If you raise the level over a glowing steel-wall then the boiler might produce more steam than the safety valves can handle and a nasty explosion would be the result.
Few parameters critical to health of the Boiler are
(4)Heat rate of the Boiler. This is a composite index of many performance indicators. Most of them will appear below.
(5)Unburnt fuel in flue gas and at boiler bottom .
(6)Flue gas furnace exit temperature.
(7)Boiler tube metal temperatures.
(8)Oxygen in flue gas.
(9)Imbalances in flue gas temperature over a cross section.
(10)Spray water consumption in Super heater and Reheater.
(11)Heat radiation from insulation.
The above all affects the performance of the boiler.
Boiler efficiency is mainly depended on the amount of losses in the system. In high capacity pulverized coal fired boilers the total losses account to about 12 to 14%. Roughly 50% of the losses are governed by fuel properties like hydrogen in fuel, moisture in fuel and ambient air conditions. The other 50% losses are carbon loss and dry gas loss. The best efficiency in the boiler can be achieved if the losses are kept to the minimum. Since 50% of the losses are dependent on the fuel and ambient condition, the best efficiency can be achieved by properly tuning the other 50%, i.e. mainly carbon loss and dry gas loss.
The coal-fired steam boiler is a forced circulation high-pressure single-tube DC boiler. Its operation process includes three processes: the combustion process of the fuel, the heat transfer process of flue gas to water and the vaporization process after water absorbs heat. In order to better control these different processes, the control system should make
the heat of pulverized coal combustion adapt to the requirements of steam load changes and dryness.
