13 Boiler Operator's Handbook ‘maintain an inventory of multiple thicknesses, get pipe insulation in one inch increments, one, two, and three (if you need three inch) etc,, and layer it for greater thick- nesses. Limit your stock of one-inch thickness to pipes two inches and smaller. For flat and large diameter sur- face insulation all I would keep is a two-inch thickness, Your inventory should also be limited to the insulated pipe diameters you actually have in the plant. Be cautious with insulation on or near piping con- taining flammable liquids such as fuel oil. The insulation can absorb it like a wick to become a fire problem later. Insulation in the area of fuel oil pumps, strainers, burn- ers and such other places that could be splashed by a leak should have full aluminum jacketing over a mastic impregnated covering to prevent a leak or splash soak- ing in. Re-evaluate your insulation once in a while. The old rule that says it should be insulated if you can’t hold your hand on it still applies. The only thing you should not add insulation to is any part of a boiler casing, The wise operator maintains the insulation in his plant. The argument that the owner won't buy any insu- lation is easily covered. Explain to the owner that you're to be there anyway so the cost of material for re- pairing or even adding insulation is recovered in fuel cost in a couple of months. The owner might even con- sider boosting your salary a little with what is saved after that. REFRACTORY Refractory is unique material in one regard because zo manufacturer will absolutely guarantee their material will remain intact. Materials exposed to the high tem- peratures of a furnace are also subject to components of the fuel that become very caustic or acidic at the high operating temperatures. Some components of fuels pro- duce considerable damage with vanadium being par- ticularly offensive. Vanadium is common in many of the heavy fuel oils and has a particular means to damage refractory. Vanadium pentoxide is molten at flame temperatures and as low as 1200°F. It remains molten at the refractory walls and soaks into the refractory during boiler opera- tion. When the burner shuts down the materials cool and the pentoxide solidifies. Being a metal oxide it shrinks at a different rate than the refractory. The differ- ence in thermal expansion, where the pentoxide soaked layer shrinks more than the regular refractory, creates a shear plane between the two materials where they pull apart. The result is breaking off of a layer of the refrac- tory from one quarter to two inches thick, a process we call spalling. The damage is very evident on inspection of the furnace because the pentoxide soaked layer has a glossy black appearance and is spotted with light tan areas where the pieces of refractory spalled off Yes, refractory does expand and contract with changes in temperature. I's nowhere near as much as it is for metal but it does grow and shrink and that must be accounted for. I've known operators to try repairing every crack that appears in the refractory in their boiler’s furnace on each annual outage and, as a result, acceler- ate the damage. Thave a rule that says any crack that is smaller than a number 2 pencil, where you can’t put a sharpened pencil in up to the yellow paint, should be left alone, Those are expansion cracks and will close up as the boiler heats up. Plugging larger cracks, as much as three- quarters of an inch, with hard refractory materials isn’t recommended. Today we have access to ceramic fibers rated at temperatures as high as 3200°F that should be used to fill those cracks. The ceramic fibers shouldn't be packed into the crack to the extent that they’re solid, leave it soft so there's room for the major pieces of ma- terial to expand into the crack. In my days of operating we used asbestos for such repairs and you could encounter asbestos in joints and cracks of refractory in an older boiler. If you have good maintenance records you'll know what you're getting into but, lacking data, treat any fibrous material as as- bestos until such time that it’s proven it isn’t One important location for providing thermal ex- pansion is around the burner throat on oil and gas fired boilers, also pulverized coal burners. The throat material is usually rated for very high temperatures because the throat is closest to the fire and will be the hottest refrac- tory in the furnace. Those of you firing gas know that the throat is glowing cherry red when the boiler is in operation. Actually it’s always red hot, regardless of the fuel, you just can’t see the glow with pulverized coal or oil fires because the bright fire lights up the furnace. Throats are either made up of pieces of a pre-fired refractory material we call “tiles” or a plastic material When we use the word “plastic” in discussions of refrac- tory we mean a material that can be molded and shaped as desired until it is dried. Plastic refractory has the con- sistency of stiff clay and looks and feels like mud with lots of sand and fine gravel in it. Either of the throat materials will expand consider- ably during boiler operation so there should always be some form of expansion joint around the throat. I'veMaintenance 135 seen many installations of plastic refractory where the throat and burner wall were monolithic (all one big piece) and they do manage to stay intact for quite a while despite the differences in temperature; I just prefer separating them because a prepared joint provides a perimeter for expansion and eventually, a repair. ‘A problem we used to have, and one that I'm cer- tain is still possible, is sagging of a plastic refractory wall which bears down on the burner throats to distort them, I still insist on a “bull ring,” a circle of special pre-fired arch brick or tile around the burner throat that supports the wall and prevents it's weight bearing down on the throat tile. The bull ring should be designed to provide a half inch gap between the inside diameter of the bull ring and the throat tile which, today, would be packed lightly with ceramic fiber. If you find yourself repairing your burner throat again you might give serious consideration to rebuilding the entire thing to get that flexibility. Burner throat repair and replacement is best left to the experts, men and women skilled in installing the materials because it isn’t easy to properly position throat tile so you get a perfect circle or shape a refractory throat in perfect form along the sweep. Sweep? That's a special tool used to shape a burner throat out of plastic refractory. Normally it’s a piece of flat steel plate welded to a pipe that fits into the oil burner guide pipe and cut to produce the form of the burner throat. (Figure 5-4) I had one on one ship that consisted of several pieces which, when assembled, formed the burner cone completely with four scraper bars and it was designed to spin into the packed plastic to produce a finished throat. I can also remember that a refractory crew in a foreign shipyard thought they didn’t need that sweep to form the throats and I ended up END VIEW Figure 5-4. Throat sweep going back into the boiler to replace their work shortly thereafter because they produced a completely different shape. If you have plastic throats make certain the in- stallers use that throat sweep and use it properly. If anyone tries to sell you a refractory “mainte- nance coating” kick them out of your plant. I may incur the wrath and ire of some manufacturers and salesmen that believe they're providing a valuable service but I don’t care. So called maintenance coatings don’t do squat as far as I’m concerned and I've never seen them do anything good, they’re usually quite harmful. Those ‘materials are, in some instances, nothing more than mud somebody dug up. Higher quality materials are seldom ‘matched to the refractory in your boiler so their thermal expansion rates are matched. The result is that much of the spalling I’ve seen is just the maintenance coating breaking away. It also fills the small cracks that provided for expansion to create stress on the face of the refrac- tory. Another regular problem with those materials is they are applied carelessly. In many of the situations where I’ve been asked to help with problems with firing gas I've found the openings in the gas ring partially blocked with that so-called maintenance coating. Instead of spending money on that junk put it in the bank to pay for a complete replacement of the refractory some years in the future. If your refractory is suitable for the appli- cation there will not be any serious degradation unless you create it. You shouldn't encounter all the problems I had with refractory because the materials and installation methods have improved considerably in the past forty years. If you do have a forty year or older boiler you may be seeing them but modern boilers with mostly water cooled walls will have very few refractory prob- lems, The one difficulty with modem boilers, especially the ‘A’ and ’O’ type package boilers is retention of the refractory seal where tangent or finned tubes are offset or lacking fins next to the boiler drums. Those sections consist of very small pieces of refractory with very little to hold them in place and, for those particular boilers, the grip has to overcome gravity so their weight is a factor. The best way to repair those is to completely re- move a section and replace it. You'll find that new ma- terial doesn’t bond to old refractory at all. As the new material cures and dries it shrinks and simply pulls away from the old material, Any refractory repair that isn’t just for a short term should consist of complete replacement of a section with adequate provisions for expansion. That repair will last136 Boiler Operator's Handbook Patches are exactly that and they don’t last. Don’t be afraid to improve on an installation either. If a repair is made because a furnace wall buckled into the furnace you should improve the anchoring as well as provide for thermal expansion. Either lack of anchoring or buckling due to thermal expansion was the cause of the failure so take measures to counter both problems. ‘Any temporary patch has to be anchored or it will be more temporary than you intended; falling out as soon as the boiler heats up. Since the repair material will shrink a little as it dries. It doesn’t matter how hard you hammer on the wet plastic refractory material (or how thick any slurry of castable refractory is) it has to be an- chored somehow. Castable, by the way, is a powder that’s mixed with water to form a very dense soupy mixture that can be poured into spaces surrounded by forms. Small areas, less than sixteen inches in diameter should be “keyed in” to the existing material. That's accomplished by undercutting the face of the existing ‘material (Figure 5-5) so the patch is wedged between the edges of the existing material and the casing insulation, Larger patches should be anchored by installing a refractory anchor (Figure 5-6) secured to the casing or brick setting so the patch is secured and will not tend to crack and buckle out as it's heated. Refractory anchors should be installed within 18 to 24 inches of each other if you don’t have a successful wall to compare to, ‘Almost any refractory repair requires a “dry-out” as described in the chapter on new start-ups. If the re- pair consists of brick or tile laid up dry, a common ar- 5 ORIGINAL a - MATERIAL ——— PATCH INSULATION ‘CASING Figure 5-5. Undercut for refractory patch Figure 5-6. Refractory anchor rangement for sealing the furnace access opening on ‘many boilers, then there's no need for a dry out because there is no moisture imbedded in the refractory. Any- thing else will have to be dried out. ‘When the patch is made with plastic refractory the dry out will be accelerated if you provide vents in the ‘material. You provide vents by poking the material with a small welding rod to produce small round holes about two-thirds of the thickness of the wet material on three to four inch centers. Steam forming in the material will then have an escape route. If the repair is due to vana- dium pentoxide damage the venting isn’t recommended because it will provide places for the oxide to soak into the refractory. Some refractory materials are labeled as air drying, some are heat drying but most are combination air and heat drying. A heat drying material reacts to a small degree with the water that’s in it to create another chemical that helps bond it together. When using heat drying material it’s important to avoid letting it air dry. You should fire up the boiler to apply the heat in accor- dance with manufacturer's instructions as soon as pos- sible. The best option is to use a combination material and it's always important to treat all of them gently so the repair isn’t destroyed in its first few hours of opera- tion. Bring the boiler up to operating temperature as slowly as possible PACKING A lot of modern designs and new materials are eliminating packing as I know it but it will be a long,Maintenance time before you won't encounter a pump, a valve, or other device with packing. Packing is material pressed into a space between a metal housing and a metal shaft to provide a seal to prevent or control leakage of water, steam, or another flui trust you noted that I used the words (or control leakage) because in many pumps that’s very important, ve run into many a new operator or maintenance tech- nician that was thoroughly convinced that the packing on a pump shouldn’t leak and destroyed the pump by tightening the packing to stop the leak. Unless a small amount of fluid leaks along a constantly moving shaft to lubricate the shaft, and protect it from rubbing, the pack- ing will cut into the shaft. If you ever see a pump shaft or sleeve reduced in diameter with gouges from the packing that’s what happens. Whether it’sa pump, a valve, acontrol float, itreally doesn't matter, there's a standard arrangement for install- ing packing. Many leaky valves I've seen consist of a re- pair where the installer simply wrapped packing around the shaft in a spiral, cut it off, jammed it in, and expected it to seal. That doesn’t work. Packing should be arranged in cut segments that barely fit around the shaft stacked as shown in Figure 5-7. The stacking doesn’t have to be pre- cisely as shown, just alternate placing the open seams Figure 5-7. Packing segment stack first 180 degrees out of phase then 90 degrees to produce complex path for any leakage to follow. Il’s actually better to have the packing rings cut a little short than a little long. If you have to jam the ends together to get the packing into the opening it will create a hard bump that can bear all the pressure placed on the packing gland so the rest of the packing ring isn’t com- pressed and doesn’t seal. If you jam ends when packing the gland on a gauge glass you've increased the odds that the glass will break when you tighten the packing, Packing of pumps usually includes a lantern ring (Figure 5-8) that has to be properly positioned in the packing gland. Always count the number of pieces of packing you take out from under one. The lantern ring provides a space for distribution of leakage into or out of the packing gland. When the packing is sealing the high pressure side of a pump the leakage into the space con- taining the lantern ring bleeds off to the pump suction, which is at a lower pressure. That recovers some of the fluid. The remaining packing, between the lantern ring and atmosphere is only exposed to suction pressure. For cooling and lubricating some flows between the packing and the shaft to the outside of the packing gland. When the packing is on the suction side of a pump operating at pressures equal to or below atmospheric the lantern ring space is piped to the pump discharge. The purpose here is to provide lubrication of the packing and shaft plus sealing the pump to prevent air leaking into the fluid. That's important for condensate pumps to keep oxygen out of the condensate. Flow in that case is into the lantern ring space. It then splits with some flow- ing into the pump suction and the rest leaking out of the Figure 5-8. Lantern ring