Get Clean Production Next Season

To gear up for season shutdown, you’re probably making your maintenance plans. Over the next few pages, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and others show off the components and services they can offer to help you through the winter. An OEM tangentially related to our industry offered some ideas for cleaning your heating elements. Let’s look at getting scale off the boiler tubes before it becomes a hazard.

For boilers that produce hot water and steam for industrial activities, scale buildup can creep into operations without you realizing it. The team at Cortec® Corporation explained scale forms when minerals such as calcium carbonate in the water combine and create scale deposits on boiler internals. The thicker the buildup, the harder it is for water or steam to flow through the pipes. This means heat transfer efficiency drops, demanding more energy to heat the boiler water and create steam.

Not all heating systems look alike but the concept remains the same. Preventing liquid asphalt cement coking or scale buildup on different heating elements protects those elements from inefficiencies and potential ruptures or breakdowns.

Scott Bryan, CWT and technical sales manager of Water Treatment at Cortec® Corporation, summarized, whenever scale is forming in any system, “If you are starving that system of its needed heat transfer efficiency, you are hurting the performance of that whole process.”

As discussed in the October issue of AsphaltPro, it takes a good overall controls system to monitor all the parts and pieces of a plant. Not every asphalt plant will employ steam heat these days, but if you’ve got it and your system doesn’t alert when there’s a change in flow or heat transfer efficiency, your facility could experience scale buildup problems long before realizing their effects. Bryan explained, if this proceeds too far, it could result in a boiler pipe that ruptures without warning, leading to major problems.

“A boiler will blow a tube and cause the whole system to come down, and that could create a catastrophic event at worst and an unplanned maintenance shutdown at best,” Bryan said. In either case, at least some plant operations will grind to a halt.

Anti-scalants have chemistries to keep dissolved minerals such as calcium carbonate from combining and depositing on the metal. This buildup prevents efficient heat transfer.

Scale Prevention

To avoid such serious problems, it’s important that boiler owners and managers take preemptive steps. The best plan is to minimize the formation of scale deposits by adding an anti-scalant to the normal water treatment program. These chemistries keep dissolved minerals such as calcium carbonate from combining and depositing on the metal. Cortec advises its own product, the S-14 Series, be added to standard water treatment formulations.

It’s a good idea to conduct scale removal every few years during routine maintenance. Photos courtesy of Cortec Advertising

Scale Removal

The second step is to periodically remove scale that has formed. This should be done whenever pressure increases and heating demands rise. However, since these indicators can be difficult to detect in a boiler, it is a good plan to conduct scale removal every few years during routine maintenance. Cortec advises using a product like EcoClean® Biodegradable Scale and Rust Remover, which is designed to dissolve scale.

Scale is a normal nuisance in boilers. However, by catching the problem early, boiler owners can avoid the most serious issues that come from scale-induced surprises such as melting or bursting boiler tubes.

For more information, contact the Cortec team at https://www.cortecvci.com/contact-us/.

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