Soot Blower Function

Following my last post about soot blowers in boilers I now want to move on to how a soot blower works.

Essentially, a soot blower is used to blow away ash or soot deposits and the standard medium it uses for this purpose is steam - hence we have the term steam soot blower.

Key points of how a steam soot blower works:

• Can be operated manually or by remote control motor.
  
• Steam is channelled into the pipeline leading to the soot blower.
• The steam passing through the soot blower must be dry, so an operator first opens a valve to drain off water in the steam.
• When this has been done, the valve is closed, the soot blower rotated and a port opened so that steam can enter.
• The soot blower tube blasts out the steam through small, drilled holes and the jet of steam targets areas in line with how the soot blower tube is rotated.
• A full rotation of the soot blower tube should mean that all surrounding areas are blasted and cleared of ash/soot.
  

This is the theory but in practice there can be problems ensuring that all ash/soot is cleared. Sometimes ash/soot build-up can be too heavy to be cleaned off completely in this way; also the soot blower might not have been rotated at the correct speed.

This is where the sonic soot blower vs steam soot blower debate arises once more. With a sonic soot blower audiosonics are used as the cleaning mechanism in preference to steam. A sonic soot blower can therefore:

a) prevent ash/soot from actually building up in the first place
b) can avoid the type of tube erosion or corrosion sometimes caused by steam from a steam soot blower.

Read more about sonic soot blowers on Knol