‘Soots’ You Sir!

As we are involved with clients worldwide within the Power Generation industry in effective ash removal, I started thinking about how soot/ash had always been a troublesome by-product associated with the burning of fossil fuels and how previous generations had attempted to deal with soot/ash removal. With the advent of Victoria Age Britain came a new soot removal system called the ‘climbing boys’. These were young boys who were small enough to climb up chimneys of large houses and clean them from the inside. These poor unfortunates were greatly abused by their notorious employers and as a result suffered from deformed joints, broken bones, burns and various types of cancers as well as sometimes chocking to death by inhaling soot. Indeed it was not until 1840 that parliament passed a law forbidding anyone under the age of 21 to sweep chimneys.

Those employed within ‘Industrial Victorian Britain’ faired little better. Although few employees actually had to physically climb up the inside of large factory chimneys, nevertheless the huge emissions of soot from such chimneys blighted the lives of the factory workers who lived in cramped terrace housing close by their place of work. They seldom saw the sun and blue skies, instead permanent, sooty smog hung over the towns resulting in the guarantee of an early grave. In the cotton towns of Lancashire around 1830, there were some 560 cotton mills, employing 110,000 people, 35,000 of them children, all working a 14 hour day. For more detailed reading go to http://www.manchester2002-uk.com/history/victorian/Victorian1.html

Even during my childhood and teenage years, the cleaning of modern domestic chimneys seemed equally as old fashioned; such as using either retractable soot cleaners with a circular brush at the tip or sucking the soot down, via a suction fan, into a cotton filter, located in the grate. However the infamous big city ‘smog’ of the fifties-early sixties has long since disappeared and we can now all enjoy blue skies and sunshine along with our ‘non- polluting’ central heating systems.

Today within the power generation industry, old technologies such as sootblowers are giving way to cleaner, more efficient innovative technologies such as acoustic cleaners, The soot blower can be one of three types – long or short retractable or rotary, fixed position. The cleaning media is usually a mixture of steam and compressed air which seeks to ‘blast off’ the hard deposits which have built up on the boiler tubes, usually after every 8 hour shift cycle. The main three problems associated with this older ash/soot removal system are:-

1] Because it relies on high pressure, erosion of the tubes is common which results in loss of boiler performance and high repair costs.

2] This steam/air jet can only reach the area of boiler tube surface directly exposed to the sootblower, allowing ash/soot to still build up, sinter and harden on the non-exposed surfaces.

3] The soot blowers themselves, especially the long retractable type carry a high maintenance cost.

There is a solution to preventing ash/soot from building up on all hot boiler tube surfaces whether within the furnace area or down stream, within the superheater or economiser sections and this is the innovative Acoustic Cleaner - sometimes called a sonic sootblower or sonic horn or even an acoustic horn. These devices use audiosonic sound waves at selected frequencies to prevent the soot/ask from building up on the entire surface of the boiler tubes and without causing any structural damage whatsoever and are literally ‘maintenance free’.

So just as innovative technologies moved us from old fashioned ash/soot removal methods within Victorian Britain and in the home, so the same innovative technologies are replacing older systems to improve the overall efficiency of industries worldwide, especially power generation plants.