Boiler Maintenance Checklist for Chemical Processing Plants
Chemical processing plants are inherently dangerous places to work. With such volatile components, the risk of explosions and fires is quite high. That includes areas like the boiler room that powers your chemical plant’s reactors.
Comprehensively checking critical systems, such as your steam boiler system, ensures that safety is always kept at the highest possible standard. In this article, we’ll be going through a boiler maintenance checklist for chemical processing plants.
WHY IS STEAM BOILER MAINTENANCE IMPORTANT?
Without proper steam boiler maintenance, any boiler room can suffer serious problems. This is especially true in chemical processing plants, which can pose an even greater risk to staff due to the volatile substances that they work with.
Adhering to a regular inspection and maintenance plan allows you to ensure that your boiler is as safe as possible. By keeping to a schedule, you can spot any potential problems before they become a major issue. Safety should always be the primary concern, especially when heating chemical reactors, which could cause serious harm to personnel and damage to property in the event of a malfunction.
Maintaining a steam boiler correctly is also important in terms of efficiency. Unmaintained steam boilers start incurring costs from a reduction in efficiency. Any business is on a tight schedule to produce, but chemical plants are under more pressure than most. Many everyday objects used across America rely on the resources produced by chemical plants.
If an issue is overlooked during maintenance, it could become a larger problem that impairs your plant’s efficiency. A sudden bout of downtime after a boiler failure can be extremely costly to your business.
STEAM BOILER MAINTENANCE CHECKLIST
Regardless of a steam boiler’s make or model, it will always need regular maintenance. Here’s a comprehensive boiler maintenance checklist:
- Boiler Construction: Choosing a boiler that is designed for safe maintenance checks is an important consideration. While modern-day boilers all comply with rigorous industry safety codes and standards, some boilers are more infamous for causing injuries to staff than others, which largely has to do with their design. Miura’s low water content boilers operate with less water in the tubes, which greatly reduces the risk of a catastrophic failure. They are also smaller in design, meaning performing maintenance procedures require less effort and are much safer.
- Check Water Quality and Treatments: Any boiler will develop scale inside over time if feed water is not correctly treated. This can become a real problem if left unchecked. But regularly checking your water quality and deploying the correct water treatments can stop boiler scale from causing bigger problems. Watertube boilers require similar water treatment practices to traditional fire tube boilers.
- Give Your Boiler Space: Steam boiler heating systems can produce lethal carbon monoxide fumes if they aren’t given enough space for safe air circulation. So it’s important to clear as much space around your boilers as possible. This also makes maintenance easier, especially with Miura’s compact watertube boilers.
- Regular Inspections: Besides the regular checks your staff perform on a steam boiler, you must schedule state inspections from professionals every year. These specialists are able to spot issues developing before they become a big problem.
- Utilize Advanced Boiler Monitoring: These ingenious systems allow you to remotely monitor several important aspects of your boiler’s performance. Tools such as Colormetry Hardness Detection systems and Miura Connect can make it easier to alert staff of potential problems before they turn into a bigger problem.
TOP BENEFITS OF MIURA’S ON-DEMAND STEAM SOLUTIONS FOR CHEMICAL PROCESSING PLANTS
Choosing a Miura watertube boiler to meet the requirements of your chemical processing plant provides several incredible benefits:
- Compact Design: Miura watertube boilers need up to 50% less floor space and can double the output capacity of your boiler room compared to traditional fire tube boilers
- Reduced Gas Costs: Using a Miura modular boiler system could save your company up to a third in gas costs. By sensing the steam demand, the Miura modular boiler system can adjust firing rates and turn units on or off to meet fluctuating load demands.
- 3-Hour Inspection Preparation Time: A fast and easy preparation before inspections means your boiler won’t have to be offline for long. Miura’s modular steam boiler systems also allow for staged maintenance work on a steam boiler. This means that while one boiler is being worked on, the rest can still operate to meet the steam requirements for a chemical processing plant.
- Modular Design: A smaller modular system allows Miura watertube boilers to be turned on and off quickly to meet changing steam demands in chemical plants. Miura’s EX-Series and LX-Series boilers can produce steam in just five minutes from a cold start.
- EX Series Dual-Fuel Options: Miura’s EX watertube boilers can run on gas or #2 fuel oil, giving you a backup solution if needed.
- Reduced Emissions: Chemical plants constantly walk the emissions tightrope. But using Miura’s low NOx out the box boilers can reduce emissions to as low as 9 ppm.
By adhering to a boiler maintenance checklist and using a Miura modular steam boiler system to power your chemical processing plant, you’ll have a safe and efficient steam source that meets your needs.
Contact us today regarding our Miura boiler preventative maintenance program to get the best routine service for your steam boiler.