OPTIMIZING THE PERFORMANCE OF THERMAL POWER PLANTS

Failure of boiler tubes has been a familiar phenomenon in power plants resulting in unscheduled plant shut down; in consequence, there are heavy losses in industrial production. The failure of boiler tubes appears in the form of bending, bulging, cracking, wearing or rupture, causing leakage of the tubes. The failure can be caused by one or more modes such as overheating, stress corrosion cracking (SCC), hydrogen embrittlement, creep, flame impingement, sulfide attack, weld attack, ash erosion, dew point corrosion, etc. Failure of tubes in Thermal power plant which is a main contributor to power generation plays a major role in forced outage. In India the Ash percentage in coal is very high i.e 40 –45% which is a major contributor in boiler tube failure in thermal power plants. In this paper, outage optimization is done through minimization of ash erosion by the use of coal