MPW’s improvements lead to savings for Southeastern pulp and paper facility

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Problem

A Florida pulp and paper mill faced a complicated, dangerous process to clean its power boiler during scheduled outages.

Previous efforts to clean the boiler included manual water jetting from scaffolding, which posed a safety risk to workers below due to the potential for falling debris.

Solution

The Operations team at MPW Industrial Services recommended that the facility’s engineers cut access doors into the power boiler, which would allow MPW to incorporate specific technological equipment to greatly increase the efficiency of this process, while simultaneously improving the safety circumstances for everyone involved.

MPW used advanced high-flow two-dimensional (HF2D) water blasting heads, which were mounted on a cable and driven with high-volume pumps to clean portions of the boiler which were inaccessible via the previous cleaning processes.

Most important, the automated system eliminated the need for MPW technicians to perform potentially dangerous and time-consuming confined space entries into the boiler.

Results

MPW finished the power-boiler cleaning in 16 hours versus the 40 hours it took with the previous process. This amounted to a $37,000 savings for the customer.

The HF2D heads also delivered a 50-percent increase in the quality of the cleaning.

According to one of the facility’s engineers, “this partnership resulted in a cleaner superheater, reduced the cleaning duration by approximately 40 percent and eliminated a major safety concern of having to enter the boiler before overhead slag threats were eliminated.

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