Advanced Erosion Protection Technology for Steam Boiler Tubes

By Chris Harley Senior Applications Engineer, Conforma Clad

Faced with deregulation, increasing retail competition and pressures to keep boilers online, many coal-red power generating stations have adopted business strategies centered on increasing unit availability, reliability and increasing the operational life of critical equipment. However, boiler tube failures continue to be the number one cause of forced outages in fossil plants today. These costly forced outages are responsible for an estimated six percent overall loss of unit availability. One of the major causes for premature tube failure is excessive reside boiler tube erosion caused by the impact, cutting action and abrasive wear of y ash entrained ue gases undercutting the area they strike. Power generation utilities and holding company goals are to extend times between major planned boiler outages. Systems types and congurations, the age of the plant, their specic plant operating demands and both preventative and general maintenance philosophies can dictate the accomplishment of these goals. Extending time between major outages two, four and even ve years is resulting in increased forced outages due to tube failures. An estimated seventeen causes of tube leaks have been sited. However, one of the most problematic, hardest to predict and seemingly increasing is erosion-caused failures. als, a number of factors must be considered. Temperature, velocity of the impacting particle, their size and shape and the impacting angle are obvious factors that can be controlled in standardized testing. However, comprehensively evaluating their performance is limited. Standardized testing procedures, such as ASTM G76, reduce a number of variables with the intent of providing a common baseline for comparison.

Erodent
High temperature erosion tests were carried out using the bed ash from an operating boiler as the erodent material. The particle morphology was a mixture of both round and angular with a mean particle size of 556 microns and mean particle density of 164.4 LBm/ft3. The erodent material particles were comprised of high concentrations of silicon and calcium with minor concentrations of aluminum, magnesium, sulfur, iron, phosphorus, titanium and chlorine.

Test Conditions
Particle Velocity: 141.2ft/s(40m/s) Temperatures: 900 F (482 C), 1100 F (593 C) Impact Angles: 30 degrees, 90 degrees Test Duration: 3 hours Loading: 0.441 Lbm (0.2 kg) Tests focused on elevated temperature solid-particle erosion under generally oxidizing conditions.

Erosion
Erosion is caused by the impact, cutting action or abrasive wear of small solid particles freely immersed in the direction of uid ow that frequently undercut portions of the material they strike. Erosion is the progressive loss of original material from a solid surface due to mechanical interaction between that surface and the impinging uid or solid particles. If high erosion-resistant particles such as Tungsten carbide exist in low erosion resistant or soft matrix, the impacting particles can undercut and remove portions of the material. However, if the high erosion resistant particles are densely packed in a matrix material that causes the impacting particles to impinge on a greater percent of the hard particle, the erosion resistance increases dramatically.

Reporting
Test results are typically reported as both a weight loss and a thickness loss for each of the tested specimens. However, since the weight measurements included the material erosion wastage (-), oxide scale (+), ash deposit (+) and different densities, the weight loss scheme was not a desirable approach for predicting the erosion rate. Therefore, the thickness loss was determined to be a more valid method for determining the erosion rates of the tested alloys.

Materials Tested
Twelve alloys were selected for high temperature erosion testing. The list was generated through a combination of those applied in the industry and those found from erosion and/or erosion data of carbon steels, stainless steel alloys, nickel-based alloys, tungsten carbide claddings and thermal spray coatings.

Erosion Testing
When evaluating the relative erosion resistance of materi-

Reprinted with revisions to format, from the August 2006 issue of POWER ENGINEERING Online Copyright 2006 by PennWell Corporation

The base material for all test samples was SA387 grade 11 alloy. The following chart shows test results for the top 11 materials tested in order of erosion resistance. The materials are in the following order from left to right: Cr3C2-NiCr coating, Wc200 Cladding, LMC-M+WC coating, Nickel alloy625, Nickel alloy622, Nickel apply 602CA, Nickel alloy52, Nickel alloy72, 312 Stainless steel, 309L Stainless steel and SA387 steel. Green represents errosion tests at 900F at 30 degrees, grey at 900F at 90 degrees, yellow at 1,100F at 30 degrees and purple at 1,100F at 90 degrees.

Erosion Issues
Unit 10s bubbling uidized bed boiler tubes were supplied with 1mm induction fused 15Cr, 4.5Fe, 4Si, balance Ni spray coating and expected an uninterrupted service life of 5 years. After two years of service, Unit 10 experienced tube leaks due to spray coating erosion failures. These tube leaks led to reoccurring forced outages

Solving the Problem

The power plant looked at three tube protection materials: High chrome weld overlay 0.140 inches thick Thermal spray 0.040 inches thick Conforma Clad inltration brazed cladding 0.030 inches thick

Results
Two-year service exposure resulted in coating failure of the weld overlay, and the thermal spray required the removal of test sections. The Conforma Clad solution, measured by eddy-current, revealed thickness loss in a localized area in line with a catalyst injection nozzle at 0.002 inches. The remaining clad area had no measurable coating thickness loss. Fluidized bed tube life was estimated at 15 or more years service life with Conforma Clad cladding.

Hot Erosion Test Summary

The results indicate that among the twelve alloys tested, the materials with the highest density of erosion-resistant particles (i.e., Tungsten carbide and Chrome carbide) showed the highest erosion resistance. The Cr3C2-NiCr HVOF-applied coating showed the highest erosion resistance followed closely by the inltration brazed WC 200 material both with erosion resistance particle percentages of close to 70 percent. Erosion resistance is complex, combining the many variables to actually duplicate and recreate eld environments is next to impossible in laboratory tests. Additional environmental factors such as thermal shock, erosion resistant material bond strength, as well as many others come into play.

Conclusion
Various maintenance programs have been initiated over the years to increase unit availability, but boiler tube failures continue to be the number one cause of forced outages in fossil plants today. Tube failures cost owners hundreds of thousands of dollars for each occurrence and maintenance teams precious man hours. While erosion-caused failures are only one of the many reasons for tube failures, returns on the initial investment of preventative maintenance programs involving high erosion prone boiler tubes have had a payback in as little as one forced outage avoidance. Utilizing todays modern erosion technologies for boiler tubes protection is getting plants one step closer to achieving the new outage-to-outage goals. For more information about Conforma Clad, please call 1 (812) 948-2118 or visit www.conformaclad.com

Field Application
One major power plant was experiencing reoccurring forced outages due to tube leaks within their uidized bed boiler tubes. This plant produces 9 billion KWh of electricity annually and consumes 12,000 tons of blended coal daily. It has 10 coal-red boilers, where units 1-9 utilize low NOx burners. Unit 10 was the nations rst commercial-scale atmospheric uidized bed combustion boiler and burns predominantly high sulfur coal from Illinois.