Fireside corrosion and deposition on heat exchangers in biomass combustion systems

To address climate change, power plants need to switch to greener fuels. One possible fuel is biomass; a carbon neutral/low carbon fuel. However biomasses’ chemistries are both different from coal’s and vary depending on their sources, containing unique levels of the trace elements (e.g., Cl and S) capable of altering the degradation of heat-exchangers. As such, an understanding of the effects of these variations on fireside corrosion is needed. Laboratory testing exposed alloys T91 and TP347HFG in a simulated agricultural product combustion environment at 600°C (up to 1000h; 100h cycles). Three different deposits mixtures were investigated (comprised of KCl, K2SO4, Na2SO4, CaSO4 indifferent percentages) mimicking accelerated corrosion from different biomasses. Corrosion behaviour was found to be dependant on both alloy and deposit chemistries, with the two materials showing different responses. The deposit with lowest KCl showed lowest corrosion damage, while the highest KCl deposit showed more aggressive behaviour.