A NOVEL SENSOR AND MEASUREMENT SYSTEM FOR FIRESIDE CORROSION MONITORING IN COAL-FIRED BOILERS

Fireside corrosion in coal-fired power plants is a major obstacle to increase the overall efficiency for power producers. The increased use of opportunity fuels and low emission combustion modes have aggravated the corrosion on boiler tube walls in power plants. Corrosion-induced equipment failure could lead to catastrophic damage and inflict significant loss of production and cost for repair. Monitoring fireside corrosion in a reliable and timely manner can provide significant benefits to the plant operation. Current corrosion inspection and measurement are typically performed during scheduled maintenance outages, which is often after the damage is done. In the past, there have been many attempts to develop real time continuous corrosion monitoring technologies. However, there is still no short-term, online corrosion monitoring system commercially available for fireside corrosion to date due to the extremely harsh combustion environment. This report describes the results of a laboratory feasibility study on the development effort of a novel sensor for on-line fireside corrosion monitoring. A novel sensor principle and thin-film technologies were employed in the corrosion sensor design and fabrication. The sensor and the measurement system were experimentally studied using laboratory muffle furnaces. The results indicated that an accurate measure of corrosion rate could be made with high sensitivity using the new sensor. The investigation proved the feasibility of the concept and demonstrated the sensor design, sensor fabrication, and measurement instrumentation at the laboratory scale. An uncertainty analysis of the measurement system was also performed to provide a basis for further improvement of the system for future pilot or full scale testing