Saw a 30-year-old boiler tube bundle look brand new after a chemical clean last week

We pulled the heads off a water tube boiler at a paper mill outside Savannah. I figured it would be the usual scale buildup mess, but after the chemical circulation, the tubes looked almost like the day they were installed. The foreman said they did a chelant treatment every 18 months instead of just acid washing when it got bad. Has anyone else seen a routine chemical program make that big a difference on older tube bundles?

2 comments

2 Comments

adam_hernandez29d ago

Hang on, you sure that wasn't just a fresh coat of paint they slapped on before you showed up? I've heard the chelant sales pitch a dozen times and seen maybe two cases where it actually made a dent past year ten. Mostly it just shifts the scale somewhere else in the system and calls it a win. Not saying the foreman is lying, just that he might be polishing a turd for the sake of keeping that paper mill running til the next shutdown.

luna58928d ago

Honestly, I had a similar setup at a plant upstate and we finally got traction by switching to a different feed point for the chelant. Put it right at the economizer inlet instead of the pre-boiler and it kept the scale from traveling as much. Took about six months of tweaking but the tube inspections actually showed cleaner surfaces for two straight years. Foreman was skeptical too but the data backed it up once we stopped treating it like a one-and-done fix.