Numerical investigation of boiler waterwall corrosion by integrated tube temperature prediction and sulfur evolution model

Abstract

High temperature corrosion has become one of the leading causes of boiler waterwall tube failures because of the wide application of air-staged combustion in coal-fired boilers. High temperature corrosion is strongly affected by the H₂S concentration and wall tube temperature distributions in the furnace. Particularly, the corrosion rate increases exponentially with the increase of tube temperature. However, by far most of the numerical studies on high temperature corrosion only considered the effects of H₂S concentration while the critical effects of tube temperature were overlooked. Thus, this paper presents a comprehensive corrosion model that incorporates the key effects of both tube temperature and H₂S concentration. Specifically, the tube temperature is predicted by a coupled combustion and hydrodynamic model that integrates the critical effects of both the boiler gas flow and steam flow on waterwall tube temperature. The H₂S concentration is predicted by a sulfur evolution model describing the devolatilization process of coal sulfur species and their subsequent gaseous reactions. The tube temperature prediction model and H₂S evolution model provide all the key parameters for accurate prediction of boiler waterwall corrosion. The corrosion model is applied to a 350 MW supercritical wall-fired boiler. The results show that the tube temperature varies significantly over the boiler waterwall, and hence, has significant impacts on the distribution of wall tube corrosion. Particularly, local high tube temperature zones could form on the waterwall areas of relatively low H₂S concentration leading to substantially higher tube corrosion rates than the adjacent wall areas. The results demonstrate the importance of incorporating both the wall tube temperature and H₂S concentration in the prediction of boiler waterwall corrosion.

Keywords:

• Coal-fired boiler
• computational fluid dynamics
• high temperature corrosion
• tube temperature

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by China Energy Investment Corporation (No. GJNY-21-168).