 | THE NEED FOR SOOT REMOVAL | |
Cleaning smoke-tube boilers running on heavy fuel, coal or wood, recovery boilers downstream the industrial processes, is necessary if keeping up the performances of these generators at a high level is wanted.
There is practically no existing on-load cleaning system, a few steam soot-removal equipment have been set up. Running on lower pressure saturated steam, their application has unavoidable consequences over the boiler's production.
Moreover, being in a high temperature environment, their maintenance is expensive.
Cleaning these boilers is mostly done off-load with rotating brooms fitted at the end of a heavy cable, more or less flexible, that conveys the motion (the motor being outside the boiler).
This operation is even more painstaking if executed with a hot boiler. On top of the physical hardship, emissions of dust and the dirtiness of the boiler room are added.
In some case, the available space at the back or the front of the boiler is so narrow that sweeping poles must be joined end to end as they are making progress inside the pipes, and then dismantled as they come out. Some tube clusters are only accessible through a manhole, which renders the handling of a rotating hose only more painfully difficult.
Finally, abundant water-cleaning is illegal because of the polluted effluents it proportionally creates.
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| THE SOLUTION | |
The ROBOTUBEmachine, a non-rotating device,, suppresses all these setbacks, because : - it is very light: less than two kilos,
- it is self-propelled inside the pipes due to its original air-compressed system,
- its performance is excellent : its progressing speed inside a normally dirty pie being of 12meters/minute with a pressure of 5 bars,
- it is very efficient : its specially designed brushes have a diameter exactly adapted to the pipes needing cleaning,
- it can operate in any pipe with diameters going from 40 to 150 millimeters,
- it does considerably improve working conditions, physical effort and dust discharges disappearing. A special adapter connects it to an aspirator collecting dust as the machine moves inside the piping.
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| EXAMPLE | |
A 10 Mwt boiler with 180 pipes 60mm in diameter and 6 meters long :
BEFORE: 2.5 days with two men working
TODAY: less than a day's work for one man
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| THE MACHINE'S SPECIFICATIONS | |
The normal soot-removal equipment consists of : - a pneumatic propeller steel-made, with a 34mm body diameter,
- a foot-operated control set, air-pressure regulator, filter and greaser
Photo: The ROBOTUBE machine. Support set, filter, regulator, lubricator, and foot-control,
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- a 10 meter long reinforced hose (15 meter long hoses can be made on request),
- two brushes and an adjuster adapted to the diameter of the pipes (an adjuster is needed as soon as the diameter is above 60mm ),
- a special adapter for the aspirator.
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