Challenging convention to improve chemistry management of sugar-mill boiler stations

Monitoring boiler-system water chemistry is important to maintain boiler assets and protect them from corrosion and scaling. Some traditional techniques developed for standard industrial or power station boilers are not effective for monitoring in sugar mills where process condensates are used as make-up. The process condensate contains a variety of contaminants including ammonia, alcohols, organic acids and occasionally sugar that interfere with some of the commonly used instruments that provide early warning of potentially damaging contamination events. This paper describes the instrumentation installed at Wilmar Sugar Invicta Mill to improve the monitoring of the boiler station chemistry and provide additional insights into potential performance issues, such as boiler carryover in real time.