How Safe Are Water Tube Boilers?

Safety is always a top priority when working with industrial boilers, at least it should be. Fortunately, safety has become less of an issue with more modern watertube boilers. Compared to traditional firetube boilers, watertube boilers are far safer, almost to the point where you don’t have to worry about a catastrophic explosion taking place.

The biggest reason watertube boilers are safer than firetube boilers is that they have less water inside them. Most firetube boilers contain hundreds if not thousands of gallons of water. A significant amount of that water is there to serve as a heat shield for the burner so that the metal inside the boiler doesn’t melt. This combination of hundreds of gallons of water and a high amount of pressure inside the boiler can be dangerous if the boiler isn’t functioning properly.

Watertube boilers, on the other hand, only require roughly 10% of the water in firetube boilers. This helps to limit the risk of too much water turning into steam instantly and blowing the doors off the boiler, which is possible with conventional boilers. More importantly, all of the water is confined inside the tubes. If one of those tubes were to break from the pressure, only that tube will be affected and not the entire boiler. This makes a serious explosion in a watertube boiler next to impossible.

Miura’s watertube boilers, in particular, also have several safety measures in place to help prevent serious problems from arising. Most notably, there is Miura’s online monitoring system called MOM, which collects real-time data about all boiler operations, making that information available to those working onsite as well as Miura’s technicians offsite. Having access to this information makes it easy to detect minor issues and address them before they become serious problems. It’s also easy for Miura technicians to troubleshoot if necessary since they’ll have access to the same information as anyone working onsite.

Thanks to Miura’s once-through boiler design and a sophisticated monitoring system, it’s no coincidence that Miura has never had a report of a catastrophic boiler explosion dating back to 1959. Miura’s modular watertube boilers are easily the safest industrial steam boilers available.

To find out more about our boilers, please contact your local Miura representative.