Root Cause Failure Analysis of Superheated Steam Tube at a Petrochemical Plant

Hosseini, Reza

doi:10.1016/j.prostr.2018.12.039

Cited by 8 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 3 publications

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“…Short-term overheating is one of the most common and destructive boiler failures that occur in fossil-fuelled power plants. The damage and associated cost of repair has led to in situ cases being studied extensively to determine the root cause of these failures [1,2,3,4]. Short-term overheating is a premature failure that occurs when the tube is exposed to higher than its design temperature, reducing the material's lifetime drastically until it ruptures.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Over-attemperation and Short-term Overheating in Pendant-type Superheaters

Basson¹,

Fuls²

2021

rdj

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A water-wedge is often suspected to be the root cause for short-term overheating in fossil-fuelled boiler superheaters. However, it can be argued that evaporation of the water-wedge would cool the tube sufficiently and prevent overheating. This study aims to determine if the thermo-physical conditions occurring at low loads support this claim by studying the transient behaviour of a representative superheater segment under postulated conditions. A flow model was constructed to facilitate direct comparison with a boiler pendant superheater of a full-scale fossil-fuelled power plant. Several scenarios of water-wedges sustained by attemperation spraywater were simulated at low load operating conditions. The temperature evolution of the tube wall was tracked and, together with calculated equivalent stresses including thermal stress, was compared to the yield strength of the material. The results show that the stresses exerted over the tube wall and throughout the tube length are not sufficient to overcome the yield strength of the tube material, even for an aged tube under severe process conditions of boiler overfiring. Evaporation of the water-wedge provides sufficient cooling to the superheater tube to prevent failure. It was concluded that water-wedging alone is unlikely to be the root cause of short-term overheating at low boiler loads. Additional keywords: Short-term overheating; water-wedge; boiler superheater tube; attemperation; thermal stress, evaporation.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%