Tube Armor Ceramic CoatingCASE STUDY

PGE Boardman Coal Plant (Portland General Electric)

610 MW Foster Wheeler Opposed Wall Fired Boiler (est. 1977)•The State of Oregon’s only coal fired boiler

•PRB Fuel

The Problem…

“Severe Fouling”

Boardman Unit 1 Boiler is a double back-pass design.

The Primary Superheats are located in the first backpass and the Re Heater is in the second.

Although both the Primaries and Re Heaters are affected by heavy slag and fouling, there was only enough time allocated during the scheduled outage to coat 47% of the Re Heater (24 out of 51 elements protected).

Future plans will be to coat the entire Re Heater, Primary Superheats, Division Walls, and Waterwalls.

The 24 elements were coated starting at the bottom of the tube penetrations and then up to the boiler roof.

Each element had a surface area of 550 square feet (tube curvature accounted for). Total area coated is 13,200 sqft.

Whertec prepared the boiler tubing by grit blasting the areas with Garnet blended with Al. Oxide.

White metal finish with a 2-3 mil profile. Overall Whertec completed the surface prep in 2.5 days utilizing only four blasting machines!

After the tubes were blasted and before any coating was installed, care was taken to completely remove any dust on the tubes, to prevent contamination.

Whertec utilized Airless Spray Coating Equipment for the Tube Armor Application.

The ceramic slurry is constantly agitated throughout the install, to keep the fine ingredients suspended in its aqueous solution.

Tube Armor Ceramic Coating was installed as two formulas altogether.

TA- F61”E” installed as the base layer at 5 mils dry. The E has erosion resistance to soot blowers.

TA- F61”S” is installed on top of the “E” layer at an average of 6 mils.

The “S” layer has very strong resistance to slag adhesion.

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Overall the Tube Armor System was installed at an average thickness of 13 mils.

Primary ROI Results:

•Higher heat absorption in the coated areas of the Re Heater

•Reduced amount of sootblowing

•Significantly less time needed to clean the elements in order to gain entry of the boiler, especially during forced outage situations

TubeArmor provides a wide range of benefits, including:

•Higher heat absorption in the coated areas of the entire boiler ($$$ in fuel, emissions, etc).

•Lower your FEGT (furnace exit gas temperature)

•Dramatically reduce Water Cannon usage or cancel plans to install them

•Reduce wear associated with soot blowing and fly ash erosion because you don’t have to run them as often or rarely at all

•Decrease the amount of money you spend at the begininning of each outage washing and dynamiting slag out of the boiler

•Save your lower slopes from taking a beating from dangerous clinker falls

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