Recovery Boiler Performance Evaluation
The recovery boiler is at the heart of a mill’s operations. Often base loaded, its through-put and up-time are critical factors in the mill’s profitability. But many RBs are decades old and improving them to meet increasing demand for paper machine output can be a real test of engineering expertise.
A recovery boiler evaluation will determine the feasibility of desired mill goals. These could include:
- Improving fuel quality and chemical recovery by increasing black liquor dry solids.
- An increase in mill pulping capacity necessitating a greater black liquor solids throughput.
- Superheater, economizer, and air heater modifications.
- Paper machine operations changes requiring more steam and/or electrical energy.
Jansen has evaluated more than 100 kraft recovery boilers world-wide, designed by a variety of manufacturers. Our practical experience across this boiler landscape allows us to provide process and equipment solutions that are truly custom to meet your goals.
Areas of Evaluation
- Liquor delivery system capacity and performance.
- Combustion air system – primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary air balance, pressures, air in-leakage, air heater exit temperature.
- Combustion performance – via in-house Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling.
- Component performance – superheater, economizer, and tubular air heater heat transfer, erosion & corrosion potential, air in-leakage, attemperation system analysis, fan and pollution control device capacities.
- Liquor, saltcake and smelt – lab analyses including elemental composition.
- Boiler circulation – via ultrasonic flow metering (UFM).
- Non-condensable gas incineration – concentrated & dilute.