Boiler tube failures continue to be the leading cause of downtime for steam power plants. Is your boiler tube failure reduction program showing improvement when compared to programs at peer plants? The EUCG’s recent update of its boiler tube failure study can help you answer that question. The full study is available only to members, but this POWER exclusive presents many of the key results, which could help you improve the operation of your plant.
The call often comes on a weekend or in the middle of the night and goes something like this: "Hello, this is the Operations Shift Supervisor from the plant calling. I hate to tell you this, but I think we have a tube leak on the unit.... Yes, it’s blowing pretty good.... No, I don’t think we can hang on until the weekend or even tomorrow; we’re starting to come off-line now.... OK, see you in a few hours."
| The bad news hasn’t changed: Boiler tube failures are still the leading cause of forced outages in coal-fired boilers. |
Those who work in power plants understand that boiler tube leaks can ruin a weekend or holiday for the plant staff. Your unit can be running along at full load, seemingly problem-free, and then an operator making a round hears the telltale roaring noise, or sees water in an economizer hopper.
Once the decision has been made to take a forced outage, the unit is taken off-line, and we wait for the furnace to cool before workers can enter. What usually follows are workers finding the leak(s), erecting scaffolding, making the boiler tube repair, inspecting the repair, and performing a hydro before the unit can return to service several days later. Sometimes we piggyback a furnace cleaning when the unit is off-line. The operation and maintenance (O&M) costs plus lost power costs can easily reach a million dollars a day.
The bad news hasn’t changed: Boiler tube failures are still the leading cause of forced outages in coal-fired boilers. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) agrees with that assessment in its Boiler Tube Failure Reduction/Cycle Chemistry improvement program description: "Boiler tube failures have been the number one availability problem for utilities with fossil plants for as long as reliable statistics have been kept in individual utilities and by nations."
The good news is that, despite aging boilers, boiler tube failures are not occurring more frequently in general, and for some categories of boilers, they have actually decreased in frequency over recent years. Lessons learned from EUCG benchmarking studies may well be part of the reason for this improvement.
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