Diagnostic of the current status of water systems in boilers at the Thermal Power Plant

Abstract

The quality of the water fed to the boilers is sometimes critical, due to the presence of impurities that can generate scale, corrosion, internal fouling in the pipes, which, in turn, reduces thermal efficiency and can cause serious failures in the asset. Diagnosing the current state of the water systems in the boilers at the Thermal Power Plant was the main objective in this work. The methods used were the Expert Competence Coefficient, the Cause-Effect Diagram, the structured interview and its processing, Cronbach's Alpha and Kendall's w statistician Delphi Method. The most important result achieved was the finding of the 9 potential causes and their sub-causes, which affect the current poor state in the boiler water systems of the thermal power plant under investigation, as well as the establishment of their criticality. Finally, a qualitative evaluation of the boiler water system performance was carried out using the following metrics: safety, service life, annual maintenance cost, failure frequency, reliability, maintainability, and availability.