Furnace Wall Corrosion in a Wood-fired Boiler

The use of renewable wood-based fuel has been increasing in the last few decades because it is said to be carbon neutral. However, wood-based fuel, and especially used wood (also known as recycled wood or waste wood), is more corrosive than virgin wood (forest fuel), because of higher amounts of chlorine and heavy metals. These elements increase the corrosion problems at the furnace walls where the oxygen level is low. Corrosion mechanisms are usually investigated at the superheaters where the temperature of the material and the oxygen level is higher than at the furnace walls. Much less work has been performed on furnace wall corrosion in wood or used wood fired boilers, which is the reason for this project. Tests are also mostly performed under laboratory conditions, making the results easier to interpret. In power plants the interpretation is more complicated. Difficulties in the study of corrosion processes are caused by several factors such as deposit composition, flue gas composition, boiler design, and combustion characteristics and so on. Therefore, the laboratory tests should be a complement to the field test ones. This doctoral project involved in-situ testing at the furnace wall of power boilers and may thus contribute to fill the gap. The base material for furnace walls is a low alloy steel, usually 16Mo3, and the tubes may be coated or uncoated. Therefore tests were performed both on 16Mo3 and more highly alloyed materials suitable for protective coatings. Different types of samples exposed in used-wood fired boilers were analysed by different techniques such as LOM (light optical microscopy), XRD (X-ray diffraction), SEM (scanning electron microscopy), EDS (energy dispersive spectroscopy), WDS (wavelength dispersive spectroscopy), FIB (focused ion beam) and GD-OES (glow discharge optical emission spectroscopy). The