Many of the process industries — among them, food and beverage, chemical processing, pulp and paper, pharmaceutical and mining — use vast amounts of water and energy in their day-to-day operations. The same is true for many large commercial and institutional facilities such as universities and hospitals. Based on mounting water scarcity concerns — and the need to mitigate risks associated with water stress and rising fuel costs — an increasing number of industrial facilities are exploring how to make better use of water resources.

A significant portion of the water used in many industrial facilities is dedicated to generating steam for process heating and other applications. Fuel costs for powering a steam plant typically consume a substantial portion of a facility’s total operational budget. To minimize these costs, optimize resources and stay competitive, plants can benefit from monitoring solutions that are designed to improve the long-term operation of boiler water systems.

One approach is through the integration of digitally enabled platforms that provide monitoring and analysis of boiler water chemistry in real time. By continuously measuring key system chemistry parameters, plants can gain valuable insights on the condition of their steam boiler systems. Such insights help inform operators on the best actions to take to maintain the highest levels of performance, reliability and output. Such measures can yield key benefits:

• Maximizing steam production and improving fuel efficiency.
• Helping to reduce water and energy use as well as curtail greenhouse gas emissions.
• Helping ensure that regulatory requirements are met.

Digital monitoring tools can help optimize boiler water treatment programs, enhancing plant safety and availability by ensuring that steam-generating assets are protected from damaging water-side scale formation. Left unchecked, scale and corrosion can diminish boiler system performance and ultimately lead to more serious problems. Controlling scale and deposition is crucial for decreasing costs related to steam production and asset management. Effective control can help diminish the total cost of operations for boiler water systems.

Targeting Fuel Efficiency

With fuel expenditures typically representing the largest operational cost for industrial plants that generate steam for process heating, facilities have good reason to adopt strategies that can reduce these reoccurring expenses. Solutions that enhance the fuel efficiency of a steam boiler system can result significant, long-term cost savings.

Boiler system processes lose efficiency when scale deposits — which act as a thermal insulator — form on internal boiler heat transfer surfaces. A layer of scale only as thick as an egg shell can dramatically reduce the boiler system’s efficiency. Such losses force plants to burn more fuel to generate the same amount of steam, which drives fuel costs higher.

By leveraging data, the analytics of a flexible, digital monitoring platform offer the additional benefit of providing continuous insight into the health of the asset. This helps plants identify emerging issues and allows operators to be proactive with their boiler system maintenance.

To address scaling, digital monitoring tools can be employed in tandem with a treatment technology such as an all-polymer dispersant or a phosphate-based, single-drum treatment program to help plants optimize their chemistry usage. Not only does this ensure that treatment is added at the right level, but it also helps ensure that that operators are not overusing a solution and contributing to excess chemical expenditures.

Keeping internal boiler heat transfer surfaces free of scale and as clean as possible helps to maintain design levels of heat transfer and fuel-to-steam efficiency, maximizing steam production. Many plants schedule temporary plant shutdowns to clean and control fouling. Importantly, controlling scale helps to improve boiler system reliability by minimizing the potential for tube failures, which can occur from overheating or under-deposit corrosion. Tube failures become a problematic issue when they require unscheduled maintenance. Scale and corrosion that cause equipment failures and unplanned outages can have a serious impact on a plant’s production capabilities and profitability.

Employing digital monitoring to optimize boiler water treatment also can help facilities ensure that the boiler system is generating the highest quality steam. Poorly controlled boiler water chemistry can contribute to diminished steam quality or even steam contamination. This, in turn, can lead to process stream or product quality impacts. Moreover, large slugs of boiler water carrying over with the steam can cause thermal and mechanical shock to the steam distribution system, causing loss of production through reduced capacity or equipment damage.

Minimizing Personnel Costs

Digital boiler water chemistry monitoring also provides workforce optimization advantages to plants in terms of streamlining onsite non-productive personnel activities. By automating certain routine boiler system tasks and minimizing hands-on maintenance time, boiler water analytical technologies can free up workers to engage in more productive operational areas of the plant, strengthening the ROI consideration. Reducing boiler system personnel costs helps plants to further increase their productivity, leading to greater profitability.

By leveraging data, the analytics of a flexible, digital monitoring platform offer the additional benefit of providing continuous insight into the health of the asset. This helps plants identify emerging issues and allows operators to be proactive with their boiler system maintenance.

Predictive Analytics

By leveraging data, the analytics of a flexible, digital monitoring platform offer the additional benefit of providing continuous insight into the health of the asset. This helps plants identify emerging issues and allows operators to be proactive with their boiler system maintenance. Such actions can be critical for mitigating potential problems early — before they can turn into larger problems.

Plants also can connect a boiler water system analyzer to an asset performance management platform. This allows operational teams to build data on performance indicators and leverage that data to improve key operational areas such as their treatment chemistry inventory management or their response time to alarms.

Developing predictive analytics that are based on system performance data can go a long way toward maximizing industrial asset reliability and availability, maximizing operational efficiency and securing production output. Ultimately, these paybacks benefit plants through improved environmental performance and a lower total cost of operations.