RELIABILITY AND MAINTENANCE IMPROVEMENTS IN LATEST GENERATION FLUIDIZED-BED BOILERS

Eero Hlikk Foster Wheeler Energia Oy Finland

ABSTRACT

The fuel flexibility of circulating fluidized-bed (CFB) technology has made it attractive in power generation where the fuel quality is not constant or where the capability to burn different types of fuels is crucial for economical operation. This environmentally friendly technology is also used in utility-scale coal-fired boilers to a wider extent because of its increased efficiency and lower emissions. During the last few years CFB technology has faced new challenges. One of those challenges is the requirement to achieve high levels of life-cycle profit, which emphasizes reductions in overall operating costs. The fuel scale has to be expanded and CFB unit sizes increased as the operators aim to use cheaper fuels and achieve more efficient steam generation processes. As a result, maintaining boiler availability has become a challenge when more difficult fuels are utilized and higher steam values are applied. New, more reliable boiler designs have been developed and existing boilers have been modified to achieve greater reliability. This development of enhanced boiler designs has been based on actual experiences from boiler operation. Only a long cumulative operation history of a large number of boilers can provide feedback data reliable enough for design evaluation and development. This paper describes how new boiler designs and design modifications have answered the challenging reliability issues and increased boiler operation reliability while decreasing annual maintenance costs. The reliability and performance figures of the latest generation of fluidized-bed boilers are discussed based on actual feedback and operation experiences from operating CFB units. The operational and defects statistics are used in the evaluation of the design improvements. The paper also illustrates how to prepare for forthcoming challenges and how to maintain high unit reliability in an ageing boiler fleet.

INTRODUCTION

Increasing competition in power markets is setting new demands for cost reduction to deliver increased profit over a boilers operating lifetime. As the price of electricity is set by the power markets the main focus falls on lifetime costs. From the power producers point of view this means a trend towards more efficient O&M activities as the purchase costs are already addressed and minimized in the equipment purchase phase. It is said that over 80% of all the lifecycle costs are defined/determined in the equipment design and development phase. This means in practice that the main opportunity, or responsibility, for reducing the lifecycle costs of a power production unit is on the equipment manufacturer. Only 20% of the lifetime costs are under the management of the power producer. This sets demands for the development of equipment that can be operated efficiently and reliably and can be maintained efficiently and cost-effectively.

2.1

Boiler efficiency

In order to maximize total power plant efficiency in utility-scale units, it is necessary not only to deliver high boiler efficiency but also higher steam values. Higher steam values increase boiler material costs in the purchasing phase. They also increase the need for maintenance because they tend to cause reliability problems in boiler tubes, especially final superheaters. This in turn tends to increase lifecycle costs. In practice this means that the reduction in lifecycle costs on the higher steam values are marginal in traditional CFB technology and the future trend is towards supercritical once-through CFB technology.

2.2

Low-cost fuels

Efficient operation also increases pressure to move towards low-cost fuels. Low-cost fuels set challenges for boiler manufacturers in two ways; increasing the demand for multi-fuel boilers and presenting the recycled fuels for co-combustion or alone for utility and industrial boilers.

The low-cost fuels are, or contain to some extent, recycled materials like plastics, paper, wood etc. Burning these materials, especially mixed plastics with PVC, recycled material such as demolition wood which contains wood preservatives, or materials with a relatively high chlorine content, together with high steam values, tend to cause very aggressive corrosion. This requires either more expensive tube materials in the final superheaters or new boiler designs, where the tubes of the final superheater are not exposed to highly corrosive flue gases. As the high corrosion-resistant materials increase, the boiler purchase costs and lifecycle costs increase too, and so new designs have been studied to avoid corrosion problems.

2.3

Improved maintenance

As already stated, with the majority of the lifecycle costs set during the design phase of the plant, as the reliability and maintainability depend on the plant design, the maintenance costs once the plant is in operation are important for the power producers as they are the only source of costs the owner of the plant can truly affect. This cost optimization can be done by selecting equipment that has high maintainability i.e. can be maintained easily and costeffectively. The maintenance method selection should be adaptive so that the experiences gained during operation are evaluated and the method selections are reassessed and questioned at regular intervals. This process should be continuous, particularly when the plant is ageing and the wearing of the equipment parts starts to appear.

RELIABILITY IMPROVEMENTS

The driving forces for several major design changes during the history of CFB technology have been the call for higher efficiency and dependability and the changes in the boiler operation environment. Boiler manufacturers will have to focus their efforts to develop more reliable boilers to remove design-based reliability bottlenecks encountered in former designs and earlier generations of boilers. The development will have to be based on the actual experiences gained from operating boiler units. This means that manufacturers will have to have a constant and continuous contact with the customer in order to get effective feedback.

Based on feedback, boiler manufacturers have been focusing on the reliability and maintainability of their boilers, especially the most critical parts: boiler pressure parts and refractory-lined structures. There have been two major steps in CFB boiler design development that can be used as landmarks to separate CFB boiler generations: development of modern water- or steam-cooled separators to replace heavy refractory-covered hot cyclones in order to minimize refractory problems development of INTREXTM superheaters inside solids flow in bed material return loop to minimize superheater erosion and corrosion and to enable firing of more challenging fuels with high corrosion potential. The effects of development steps towards the latest generation of CFB boilers discussed in this paper are based on the actual experiences and statistics of CFB units of the large industrial size and smaller utility-scale from 120 MWth up to 400 MWth with both fossil and bio fuels and their mixtures as the main fuel. Units with recycled fuels as the main fuel components (>20%) are excluded from this analysis.

3.1

Solids separator development

In the early years boilers had heavy refractory-covered cyclone separators. The refractory structures experienced cracking and from time to time also sustained major damage as the anchoring could not hold the refractory tiles especially in the cyclone roof area. Annually this meant approx. 56 hours of unavailability on average, varying from near 0 to over 100 hours. The total share of refractory damage was almost 20% of all the unavailability. The heavy refractories also required significant maintenance during scheduled maintenance outages. The damage in heavy refractories identified the need to improve the refractory materials and to minimize the amount of refractory in a boiler. This lead to the invention of cooled separator structures, where the separator walls are water- or steam-cooled and covered with only relatively thin cast refractory material for erosion protection. Also the structures of the sand return leg are cooled. Figure 1 below compares the average annual unavailability hours of hot cyclone design and modern cooled separator design boilers. The hours for each are presented in two categories:

unavailability hours caused by cyclone/separator refractory damages and the unavailability hours caused by sand return system and the expansion joints. The hours are presented as a function of unit nominal thermal power. Figure 1: Average annual unavailability hours of hot cyclone design and modern cooled separator design in smaller utility-scale boilers
200.0 175.0 150.0 125.0 100.0 75.0 50.0 25.0 0.0 0

Hot cyclone refractories Sand return leg and exp. joints Cooled separator refactories INTREX sand return

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Boiler thermal power [MWth]

Even though there had been some minor damage due to installation errors in the refractories of cooled separators, the total amount of refractory and expansion joint damage and the unavailability due to these issues has decreased dramatically. The average annual unavailable hours in smaller utility-scale CFB boilers caused by refractory damage decreased from over 55 hours to less than 3 hours with the use of cooled separators, which corresponds to the decrease from 20% to 2 % of the total unavailability. In large utility-scale boilers the statistics are less detailed due to the relatively limited number of reference boilers, but the improvement in unavailable hours seems to be even bigger, as Figure 2 shows. Figure 2: Average annual unavailability hours of hot cyclone design and modern cooled separator design in large utility-scale boilers.

400.0 350.0 300.0 250.0 200.0 150.0 100.0 50.0 0.0 0

Hot cyclone refractories Sand return leg and exp. joints Cooled separator refactories INTREX sand return

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Boiler thermal power [MWth]

At the same time the maintenance costs of refractories decreased, as there was no damage during operation, and the amount of refractory replacement and the other refractory maintenance needed at every outage decreased to near zero. The percentage of refractories replaced annually in an approx. 300 MWth unit with a hot cyclone design can be as high as 10% of the total refractory amount, with an average of 5%. The share of the total annual maintenance costs accounted for by refractory repairs could be as high as 40%, with an average of 25% as can be seen in Figure 3. Figure 3: Annual maintenance costs for refractories and for boiler plant in total, both in annual costs and related to boiler thermal power.
Total maint. costs [kEUR/a] Refractory maint. costs [kEUR/a] Total maint. costs [kEUR/MW,a] Costs/MW [kEUR/MW,a] Annual costs [kEUR/a] 1500.0 1250.0 1000.0 750.0 500.0 250.0 0.0 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 Boiler thermal power [MWth] 350 15.0 12.5 10.0 7.5 5.0 2.5 0.0 400

The hot cyclone design also requires large expansion joints, which can also experience some damage and although they are not as critical component as the refractories, they also require quite a lot of maintenance. The annual average unavailability caused by expansion joints and bed material return system has decreased from 4 hours to 3 hours.

3.2

Superheater development

Early CFB boilers had different types of superheaters in addition to traditional convective superheaters. Typically they were located in the flue gas flow before the boiler separator, such as Omega superheaters. Omega superheaters are horizontal superheaters inside the furnace penetrating the furnace front and rear walls. The penetration points form a discontinuity point in solids flow and tended to cause erosion in nearby furnace wall tubes. Leaking steam from furnace wall tubes caused further erosion in superheater tubes. After such tube damage the area of tubes that needed repair was large and the repairs were quite slow as the penetration points had to be rebuilt and the repair required scaffolding. The lowest tube rows are equipped with erosion shields to protect against direct erosion by bed material. Also the tube shields experience some problems, especially with shield hangers causing the shields to drop off, exposing tubes to erosion. The erosion damage in Omega superheaters caused an average of 15 hours of unavailability, which is almost 10% of the total annual unavailability. In some boilers even 70-90% of the annual unavailability was connected to Omega superheaters. That corresponds to 190-300 annual unavailable hours. As the trend continues towards the use of cheaper, lower-quality and recycled fuels with high corrosion potential in high temperatures together with higher steam values, this increases the corrosion potential in the other convective superheaters, mainly the final superheaters. For this reason, new superheater designs were studied.

The first commercial INTREX superheater in industrial-scale boilers with recycled fuels was built in 1997, and in 1999 this technology was applied to utility-scale plants. It is a tube bundle superheater which is located in a separate chamber in the bed materials circulation loop in the loop seal as a final superheater. Its tubes are covered in fluidized bed material with no contact with the flue gases and fly ash flow and therefore has a low corrosion potential. As the fluidization velocity in the chamber is moderate or small the erosion effect is minimal or non-existent. Using an INTREX superheater as a final superheater enabled the combustion of recycled materials, even waste like refuse-derived fuel (RDF) in boilers with relatively high steam values.

Figure 4 compares the average annual unavailability hours of superheaters in boilers with Omega superheaters with the unavailability hours of modern design boilers with a INTREX superheater. The data for each is presented in two categories: unavailability hours caused by Omega/ INTREX leakages and the unavailability hours caused by leakages in convective superheaters. The hours are presented as a function of unit nominal power.

Figure 4: Average annual unavailability hours for superheaters in boilers with Omega superheaters compared with modern design boilers with INTREX superheater.
50.0 40.0 30.0 20.0 10.0 0.0 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 Boiler thermal power [MWth] Conv. SHs in Omega design Omega SHs Conv. SHs in INTREX design INTREX SHs

With INTREX superheaters the annual forced outage hours due to superheater tube failures decreased as there was no need for Omega superheaters. The average annual unavailability hours in utility-scale CFB boilers caused by superheater leakages decreased with the INTREX design from approximately 15 hours to less than 5 hours. In addition to INTREX tube failures the annual unavailability hours of convective superheaters decreased from 9 hours to practically zero. As the final superheater, the INTREX enables lower steam temperature after the last convective superheater stage and therefore decreases the corrosion in convective superheaters. 3.3 Availability improvement due to new designs

With design improvements the overall availability of CFB units has increased in CFB boilers burning bio and fossil fuels. The graph in Figure 5 presents the overall development of boiler availability in CFB units. Data are sorted by the commissioning year of the boiler. Figure 5: Overall development of boiler availability in CFB units.

100.0 % 98.0 % 96.0 % 94.0 % 92.0 % 90.0 % 1988 Hot cyclone separator Cooled separator, no INTREX Cooled separator with INTREX 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 Year 2000 2002 2004 2006

Recently fuel has become more and more challenging also in utility-scale units as the cocombustion of several fuels has increased. Even though the fuels are more challenging, availability has been maintained at the same level as 20 years ago and has even slightly increased. The effect of more challenging fuels can be seen in Figure 6 where the annual availability figures are presented sorted by relative fuel difficulty on the x-axis. The relative fuel difficulty is normalized to the most difficult fuel in the reference boiler group. Figure 6: Annual availability related to relative fuel difficulty
100.0 % 98.0 % 96.0 % 94.0 % 92.0 % 90.0 % 0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 Relative fuel difficulty 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0 Hot cyclone separator Cooled separator, no INTREX Cooled separator with INTREX

The trend lines in graph show that the advantages of modern CFB design become more significant when the fuel becomes more challenging. This paper is focusing on the utility-scale units which in practice means that the percentage of recycled fuels in the analysed units is relatively low, less than 20%. In CFB units with more than 20% of recycled fuels the availability has been only slightly lower. In recycled wood units the decrease in availability due to fuel has been only less than one percent and even in entirely waste-fired boilers the availability has been near 90%. This may seem like a low availability (Should this be unavailability?), but without the latest INTREX design CFB

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boilers would not in practice be suitable for burning recycled fuels, especially 100% waste fuels, with todays requirements for high steam values.

MAINTAINABILITY IMPROVEMENTS

Reliability is the key issue in optimizing boiler lifecycle profit, but maintainability development is today becoming a more important tool towards achieving a low-maintenance CFB boiler. Along with the design changes targeted at improved reliability of the CFB boiler, the boiler maintainability is also taken into account in CFB boiler development. In CFB boiler pressure part and layout design the maintainability improvements are mainly focusing on the accessibility of the boiler parts, but also the ease of dismantling, repairing and reassembling, as well as the working positions and overall safety. In CFB boilers the maintainability is mostly taken into account in superheater placement in order to maximize the accessibility of the tubes for case of emergency repair. The INTREX design itself improves boiler maintainability as the superheaters are not located inside the furnace at a high level requiring scaffolding for even minor maintenance or repair. The tube packages are located at a relatively low level and are designed so that they can be removed from the chamber easily, enabling fast repairs outside of the dark and dirty conditions of the boiler furnace. The location of the chamber can be equipped with appropriate space, hoists and fixed scaffolding for the repair works or even total replacements. In the latest CFB designs, especially for corrosive fuels like wastes, the location and design of convective superheaters is also optimized for the fast maintenance action and tube bundle replacements. Also the convective superheaters are brought to a low level and there is enough free space reserved for lifting up the entire tube bundles for repair or replacement. A hoist can be also provided at the location for the task. The maintainability of even normally maintenance-free equipment, like valves, may be crucial for the entire plant availability in case of emergency repairs and therefore must be considered in the design phase. In this task 3D design programs have provided a new approach as the operators and maintenance staff of a new plant can walk through the virtual 3D model of the unit in order to find the bottlenecks in equipment accessibility and other

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maintainability bottlenecks. Together with a range of maintainability analysis methods this kind of approach has expanded the ability to design for maintainability far beyond the traditional equipment and layout design methods.

AGEING

5.1

CFB boiler ageing

In CFB boiler availability there is clearly the early phase with so called teething problems or infant mortality. In later phases of the boiler lifetime, after a constant availability period, the availability tends to decrease as the equipment tend to wear out when the boiler is ageing. Depending on the equipment the phase when ageing starts to show in availability statistics varies a lot as do the ways of ageing. Based on the statistics the first signs of decrease in total boiler availability can be seem after 15 to 17 years as can be seen in Figure 7. Figure 7: CFB unavailability over time
5.0 % 4.0 % 3.0 % 2.0 % 1.0 % 0.0 % 0 5 10 Boiler age [years] 15 20 Hot cyclone separator Cooled separator

The availability starts to decrease because of the following reasons: Some equipment or structures simply wear out due to erosion, corrosion, abrasion or some other slowly developing defect types. In CFB boilers these defects are typically erosion in economizer and furnace wall tubes, corrosion in ESP plates, and increased erosion defects in fuel feeding lines, ash and sand systems and air nozzles. Some equipment exposed to mechanical or thermal cycling starts to develop cracking or creeping as the material reaches the limit of such a cycles. The effects of mechanical

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cycling can be seen in the increased incidence of fan impeller damage after 18-20 years. Thermal cycling also increases boiler tube damages outside the flue gas flow. Electrical components usually have very evenly distributed lifetimes, but in larger electrical systems, like fan frequency converters, the ageing behaviors can be seen after 15-18 years of operation due to dust, excessive heat and other conditions that shorten the lifetime of electrical components. The increasing number of failures in the equipment causes abnormal operation situations like fast dynamic changes which further increase the ageing of the other equipment.

5.2

Counter actions against ageing

The plant owners or managers have already, at the beginning of a units operation, selected a maintenance strategy such as total productive maintenance or reliability-centered maintenance, based on the economic or technical limits set by the operating environment. In the early phase of the operation, when most of the equipment is as good as new, the maintenance can be mainly proactive, either time-based or condition-based. For some equipment the selected maintenance strategy may even be reactive while the other equipment are maintained according to a schedule or based on simple condition measurements like bearing vibration levels. As the boiler is ageing the probability of an equipment failure tends to increase, which calls for the re-evaluation of the maintenance strategy. Re-evaluation of the maintenance strategy should be done even before the plant ageing is visible in the availability statistics. There is a need for re-evaluation if: the number of failures in an equipment is increasing; there are clear signs of wear-out in visual inspections; the condition of equipment in inspections is otherwise worse than before; or the consumption of an input (oil, water, electricity) has increased dramatically.

As the type of ageing and the age when it starts to show are strongly dependant on the equipment itself, the re-evaluation should be done individually for each piece of equipment. This may require quite a lot of work, but will finally pay for itself. The uncritical equipment which can be replaced quite easily at low cost may still be maintained reactively, but for the critical equipment that may stop the unit operation if a

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failure occurs, the re-evaluation should be done. For some of the most critical components like boiler pressure parts the need for maintenance increases as the probability for tube failures increases with age. In practice this means that the condition of an equipment item should be monitored constantly even though the actual maintenance actions or inspections may not be performed more frequently than during the early phase of the boiler lifetime. This sets pressures for moving towards predictive maintenance. Instead of replacing the pressure parts when the tube thickness is worn below the change limit, or dealing with tube leakage repairs, the predictive maintenance strategy is trying to predict when a certain part should be replaced. Predictive maintenance requires that the equipment condition is monitored constantly online or at least regularly. The level of condition monitoring should be based on the maintenance strategies and the decisions for applying monitoring procedures for each item of equipment should be based on the results of the maintenance strategy re-evaluation. The condition monitoring alone does not provide the means to decrease the effects of equipment ageing, but will provide means for the maintenance improvements. The investment in monitoring systems or equipment is not the critical issue; the most critical issue is the commitment of maintenance and the operational staff to frequently monitor the condition of the equipment and the commitment to extend the equipment lifetime with effective maintenance. Usually this calls for moving towards more sophisticated maintenance strategies and methods.

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Primary contact and author: Mr Eero Hlikk Development Engineer Foster Wheeler Energia Oy P.O. BOX 201 FIN-78201 VARKAUS Tel +358 (0)10 393 7492 Fax +358 (0)10 393 7743 eero.halikka@fwfin.fwc.com

Co-authors: Mr Dariusz Lewinski Technical Director CHP ELCHO (Elektrocieplownia ELCHO Chorzw) tel. +48-32-771-40-00 fax. +48-32-771-40-20 dariusz.lewinski@elcho.com.pl Mr Kazimierz Szynol Operating Director Poudniowy Koncern Energetyczny S.A. Ul. Lwowska 23 40 - 389 Katowice Tel.: +32 731 22 11 Faks: +32 731 22 12 kszynol@pke.pl

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