How To Prevent Low Pressure Boiler Accident
Low pressure boilers are commonly used for industries, such as steam boiler for chemical industry, biomass fired boiler for textile mill, gas or oil fired industrial boilers, and other industrial boilers. Wherever the boiler is used for, the most important thing during productive process is safety. The factors that lead to boiler accident including water level, heating temperature, corrosion and leakage in daily life, and some carelessness of operator and so on, so daily maintain is necessary.
Accident prevention measures for boilers
Generally, we can escape boiler failures with the maintenance and operational procedures such as:
1.No shutdown-start up too often. Frequent shutdown and start up will lead to thermal fatigue.
2.Blow down regularly. Inadequate blow down will results in sludge accumulation and scale buildup, which will not only affect the boiler efficiency, but also lead to explosion because of being unevenly heated. Blow down is necessary particularly for large scale boilers which contain large quantity of boiler water inside.
3.Pre-treatment of boiler water. Water is indispensable material in steam boiler and hot water boiler. Increasing the water temperature can drive out the oxygen. Proper chemical treatment is also required for boiler water. Lack of proper water pre-treatment will results in accelerated corrosion and attendant thinning of the steel shell, tubing, and tubesheets including stress corrosion and crevice corrosion of welded joints. Faulty water treatment resulting in increased concentrations of dissolved sodium that leads to caustic cracking particularly in weld-zones.
4.Inspect the safety relief valves regularly. The safety relief valves will work when the boiler operating beyond the safe operation scope. Lack of maintenance or bad setting of safety relief valves will result in failure of valves, even explosion.
5.Other control systems. Water lack is one but not the only main reason of boiler failure. Low water usually results in overheating and loosening of tubes, collapse of furnaces, it can be detected and avoided maintenance procedures. Daily maintenance of automatic control systems, such as water level monitors, temperature meter, pressure meter could ensure normal operation of boiler and prevent accident effectively.
