Case Study: Coal - Automated Water Cleaning
CLIENT: MIDWEST COAL-FIRED FACILITY
PROJECT: AUTOMATED WATER CLEANING
BACKGROUND
A Generating Station located in the Midwest had been a client of Groome / ExPro for the past 4+ years. The facility now sought to wash their Unit 3 boiler backpass during both their scheduled spring and outages. Unit 3 is a 364MW Foster Wheeler front-firing boiler.
OBJECTIVE
The original objective for this outage was to clean the upper Economizer section. However, after a pre-outage visual inspection was completed, the plant decided that both the Superheat and Reheat sections would need to be cleaned. The tube spacing on this unit tends to create significant pluggage in these areas, and since the entire backpass had not been recently cleaned, the plant started to see significant pluggage on some of the outer tube sections that was creating some tube leaks due to ash erosion.
SOLUTION
Groome / ExPro went to work utilizing two “backpass” machines simultaneously for the offline wash. Our patented “backpass” machine is a high volume/high pressure, fully automated oscillating cleaning system. This technology is remotely controlled from outside the backpass area. This configuration takes out the “human element”, therefore making the total operation extremely safe and efficient.
RESULTS
By opening up both our Superheat and Reheat sections, this Generating Station picked up in the range of 1.5-2.0” of suction psi for the ID fans and reduced the overfiring that they were experiencing. The specialized water washing services provided by the Groome / ExPro team contributed to a net of 40MW gain.
TESTIMONIAL
“The Groome / ExPro team is always professional and is more than willing to go the extra mile for us. They do what needs to be done, and take pride in both exceeding customer expectations and saving the customer money. This team is our ‘go-to’ contractor for cleaning. If needed, we move projects around to get them in here because they are that good at what they do.”