Boiler tubes are a critical component of any boiler system, responsible for carrying hot gases and steam throughout the unit. These tubes play a crucial role in ensuring the efficiency and safety of the boiler, making them an essential investment for any industrial or commercial facility. By choosing high-quality boiler tubes, you can significantly improve the performance and longevity of your boiler system. Quality tubes are resistant to corrosion, erosion, and high temperatures, ensuring they can withstand the harsh conditions within a boiler. This durability not only reduces maintenance costs but also minimizes downtime due to tube failures.
Boiler tubes play a vital role in pipelines, thermal equipment, machinery industry, petroleum geological exploration, containers, chemical industry, etc. However, in recent years, the safety of boiler tubes has been threatened to a certain extent due to processing defects. Strengthening the improvement of manufacturing technology is an important way and solution to strengthen the safety of
boiler tubes.
1.1
Impact on boiler tubes with a great safety factor
For some parts with great tube wall strength or greater safety factors, processing defects do not pose a great threat to their safe operation. As long as the operator follows the correct method, there will not be many problems.
1.2
Impact on boiler tubes with small safety factors
For some boiler tube parts with low tube wall strength or small safety factors, processing defects pose a great threat to their safe operation and may also reduce the service life of boiler tubes, affecting the safety of operators. For example, after eight superheated steam pipes of a 40 t/h boiler are operated for 52,000 hours, when the back of the elbow of the boiler tube is at a temperature of 92°C, the back of the elbow of the boiler tube will rupture. The broken steel pipe had a relatively brittle fracture, with a pipe width of 3.5 mm and a pipe length of 165 mm. After hot acid etching, it was found that there were many small longitudinal cracks in the outer wall of the boiler steel pipe, among which the big cracks became holes. After cutting, many small cracks appeared on the non-cracked gas guide pipe corresponding to the cracked gas guide pipe. After calculation by the stress calculation, the cracked part of the superheated steam pipe of the boiler tube bears the greatest stress. The thermal synthetic stress is 7.36 kg/mm2, and the actual synthetic stress under normal operating conditions is 9.525 kg/mm2. The occurrence of such a deviation can only mean that there is a problem in the design of the superheated steam pipe of the boiler tube, and that the design is unreasonable. This causes the superheated steam pipe to operate in an unsafe state for a long time, and the possibility of cracks gradually increases.
1.3
Impact caused by processing defects of elbows
There are two bending processes for boiler tubes. One is cold bending and the other is hot bending. For hot bending, the required temperature must be higher than 800°C so that normal processing can be carried out. Theoretically, the sand required for processing pipe elbows cannot be mixed with glass flakes or low-melting-point metals, otherwise, it will stick to the surface of the steel pipe, directly affecting the safety of the boiler pipe and thus the safety of the boiler. For cold bending, the possibility of cracks during the processing is increasing due to the low processing temperature. Generally speaking, when the cold working temperature of the elbow becomes lower and lower, the processing speed will become faster and faster, so the cross-sectional size of the steel pipe will become larger and larger, resulting in the stress of the boiler steel pipe being greater and greater. Under this situation, the possibility of a cracked boiler tube is increasing. If the inspection is not carried out, it will cause great hidden dangers to the safety of the boiler.
2.
Conclusion
The safety of the boiler tube is a key factor affecting the normal operation of the boiler. It is related to the safety of the boiler and the operators. However, in real production and life, the safety of boiler tubes poses a great challenge due to defects in processing technology, which greatly threatens the safe operation of boiler tubes. Therefore, taking scientific measures to improve the processing technology of boiler tubes is currently a major and urgent task. First of all, we must strengthen supervision and inspection of all aspects of production process of the boiler tube, strengthen inspection of each process, use advanced computer technology and network communication technology to discover potential safety hazards, strive to improve management levels, and reduce processing defects in the production process. Secondly, it is necessary to strengthen the training of professional knowledge and skills, improve the professional knowledge level and ability and quality of processing operators to deal with emergencies, and improve the processing technology of boiler tubes.
