Georgios Panayiotou

Un. ID.: 7490351

Boiler Feed water Treatment & Blowdown

(Simon Perry, 2007)

As it is assumed the cooling water and the boiler feed water to produce the
heating steam is river water. Due to the fact the river water is sweet and is
high in contaminants, should be definitely treated. Especially, boiler feed water
should treated extra, as is very important for the purity of the steam. In case of
low purity steam, this will cause fooling and even corrosion to the shell and tube
heat exchangers. Subsequently, the heat exchanger rates will decrease
significantly. Thus boiler feed water treatment is very important to be efficient. 1
There are various methods for boiler feed water treatment. Some of them are the
fallowing.
-

Gravity filter
Pressure filter
Membrane separation
Deaeration column
Limestone
Ion Exchange
The method/s that is/are going to be used for treatment depends on the type and
nature of the impurities.
In river
2012):

water can be found the fallowing types of impurities (Spirax Sarco,

Solidified particles (minerals etc)

Dissolved particles (minerals/salts etc)
Dissolved gases (usually oxygen and CO2
Dissolved acetic substances (i.e. sulphur)
Film of particles floating on the whole surface
In the particular case the most usual to appear is solidified and dissolved
particles and dissolved cases both oxygen and CO 2. Thus, first of all, filtering

Georgios Panayiotou
Un. ID.: 7490351
(pressure filter) is going to be used to remove for the solidified particles fallowed
by a Deaeration column to remove both CO2 but mainly oxygen. (Spirax Sarco,
2012)
Noted that pure H2O it is very rare to be found in nature, due to the cycle of
water. During its cycle water collected carbonic acid, nitrogen and sulphur
dioxide due to factories emissions, and mineral from the soil in addition to
oxygen gas and carbon dioxide gas. Depending on the soil and on the ambient
atmosphere (highly industrialised or not) the PH and the hardness of the raw
water varies. It is always good to take sample and measurements to try to find
the best quality of raw water within the small radius form the site.
Further on chemical treatment is going to be used to remove all the rest of CO 2
(and other carbon oxides) which is dissolved in water. A very good chemical
treatment method for removing CO2 from water is limestone. The CO2 when is
dissolved in the water forms the carbonic acid (H 2CO3), which is dissolved by the
calcium carbonate (limestone) producing the calcium bicarbonate, which it is
trapped in the limestone.
Obviously, the next step down to process is the boiler. For the heating steam
supply for all 3 processes (Plant A, B and C) is going to be use only one boiler, as
shown in the figure above, of inlet BFW (boiler feed water) flow rate 102.687 t/hr,
operating pressure 40 barg and steam generation rate 97.792t/hr.
Due to the fact that the case of built up of particle remain in the treated BFW the
need of blowdown valve is absolutely necessary. The blowdown rate is calculated
based on the steam generation rate of the boiler and the TDS (Total Dissolved
Solids) of the BFW. The maximum allowable TDS for the particular boiler is 2
500ppm. (Spirax Sarco, 2012) The inlet of the boiler is assumed that has 250
ppm solids.
In general, the boiler blowdown rate is define by the evaporation rate over the
feed rate times 100 For small low pressure boiler the blowdown rate is with the
range 5-10%, for large high pressure boilers 2-5% and for large boilers with vey
pure feed less than 2% blowdown rate. (Simon Perry, 2007).
In this case it is large boiler with high pressure (40barg) so the blowdown rate
can be initially assume to be within the range of 4-6%.
The blowdown rate is define form the formula below. (Spirax Sarco, 2012)
Blowdown rate (kg/hr) =

FS
BF

Where,
F= TDS in BFW (ppm)
S=steam generation rate (kg/hr)
B= TDS in required boiler water (ppm)
Total boiler feed water required= 68. 6935kg/hr
Boiler pressure=40 barg
Boiler rating =100 000 kg/hr
Maximun allowable TDS in boiler (B) = 2 500 ppm

Georgios Panayiotou
Un. ID.: 7490351
F (TDS in BFW) = 250 ppm
S= 97 792.20 kg/hr
Using the blowdonw fomula:

B=

F S 250 ppm 97 792.20 kg /hr

=
BF
4000 ppm250 ppm

Blowdaown rate

B= 6519.48

kg/hr = 1.81096666667kg/s

kg
hr
Blowdown persantage=
100 =
100
kg
kg
Evaporation(steam generation)( )
97792.20
hr
hr
Blowdown rate(

kg
)
hr

6519.48

B=
6.66 %
H= boiler enthalpy (kJ/kg)
H= 782 KJ/kg (form steam tables)
BH=Blowdawn enthalpy (kW)
BH=782kJ/kg*1.81096666667kg /s
BH= 1.416MW
Noted that, to control the boiler blowdaown rate it will be used an orifice plate
and the blowdown stream will be connected with a stoage vesell (blowdown
vessel).

HEN 6.0 Heat Exchangers Network Design

6.1 Plant A
All the HEN design for plant A are constructed based on the fact the steam
generation is fully utilise. The possibility HEN without steam generation and with
cooling utility at 15753.312kW (the initial minimum cold utility requirement) was
rejected as the huge amount of energy is waste which can not be recover and
that not sustainable and not profitable choice at all.
The first attempt was to design a HEN by hand (and validated on Sprint) without
steam generation meeting the initial minimum utility requirement. The second
attempt for plant A was done initially by hand and validating in Sprint using MP
and HP steam generation. By optimising on Sprint (objective; minimum total
cost) both HEN design attempts was shown that second attempt has much lower
total cost than fist attempt due the fact that the profit form steam generation
was subtracted from the total cost giving a more attractive solution.
Thus the first attempted was rejected and did not analysed further.
All HEN design were performed based using the optimum Dtmin which was
found to be 10oC for plant A.

Georgios Panayiotou
Un. ID.: 7490351
Furthermore, Sprint was put to construct an Automated Design HEN to compare
its economics and its operability with the hand-based HEN design optimised by
Sprint Software. Is worth noting that an automated simulation software package
as Sprint operates with the manner that the user will input a valid initial guess, in
the particular case a validated initial HEN design, far from the solution, which is
the optimised HEN design, thus the software will performed a big number (n) of
iterations (more than 500 iterations in the simple case in Sprint Software)
moving away from the initial guess to reach the optimum solution after n
iterations. Therefore, if the user input as an initial guess a value (HEN design)
that is very closed to the optimised solution the software will still do the some
big number of iteration moving away from the actual optimum solution. Thats
why for the particular attempt as initial network should not be input the handbased HEN design validated on Sprint, or the optimised HEN but should be input
a validated network far from the optimised one. A good initial network, which
was used for the Automated HEN design is connecting all the hot streams by the
cooling utilities and all the cold streams by the hot utilities, splitting the utilities
streams according with the respective streams and giving loads each heat
exchanger equal to the duty requirements of each process stream.
For plant A, even if the is no hot utilities, the cold streams will still be connected
with the negative hot utilities.
When the Automated HEN design was configured by Sprint software was
optimised for minimum total cost by Sprint as well. Comparing the total cost of
the final second (optimised by Sprint hand based Hen) and final third attempt
(optimised Automated Design), the Automated HEN design gave lower total cost
even though requiring more heat exchanger unit is still the preferable.
Due to space limitation in presenting all three attempts with each intermetet
stages, only the final third attempt (optimised Automated Design) will be
illustrated in this report.
Optimised plant A with steam generation: taking 10114 iterations

Georgios Panayiotou
Un. ID.: 7490351
Area
: 704.148
[m^2]
HX Area Cost : 0.116092E+09 [$/yr]
Total Network Cost : 0.116055E+09 [$/yr]
Total HX area : 704.148
[m^2]
Process area : 96.4090
[m^2]
Utility area : 607.739
[m^2]
MP gen
4450.31 kW
HP gen
2589.02
kW
CW
8713.51
kW

Plan B

NMER (Euler) =17

Total HX area= 11576.27m2
Hot Utility= 4471.82KW
Cold Utility= 12726.8KW
Process Heat Recovery= 45821.4KW
Steam Generation; LP=8628.6KW, MP=18.19KW
Total cost of HEN design=7176070/yr

Plant C
There is No steam gen, but gt exaust below pinch use of heat to gen steam

Total HX area= 1022.27m2

Hot Utility= 23600.0
Cold Utility = 0

Georgios Panayiotou
Un. ID.: 7490351
Process Heat Recovery=143800KW
No Steam Generation
Total cost of HEN design=9652387/yr
Heat Exchanger Units needed: 9

Ref
for
boil:ALL
THE
boiler
stafABOVE
WAS
TAKEN
FROM
http://www.filter.ee/extensions/filter/brochures/250-65446.pdf
Technical
Reference Guide, SPIRAX SARCO Steam Boilers; Water Treatment, Storage and
Blowdown for Steam Boilers. FULL PDF EDITION
1 (http://www.spiraxsarco.com/resources/steam-engineering-tutorials/the-boilerhouse/water-treatment-storage-and-blowdown-for-steam-boilers.asp)
2 http://www.filter.ee/extensions/filter/brochures/250-65446.pdf
(Perry (utilities lecture notes), 2012)
Ref for hen:
Sinnot and Towler , 2005, 4th edition, Chemical Engineering Design, Chapter
16.4 , p .637, 639