Principles, operational challenges, and perspectives in boiler feedwater treatment process

Because boilers are the throbbing heart of numerous industrial processes, optimization of their operating features, especially feedwater, is absolutely crucial from an environmental, economic, and efficiency standpoint. Inappropriate boiler feed water treatment results in significant operating failures, which can adversely affect the healthy operation of industrial boilers. Increasing equipment service life, preventing prolonged downtime, minimizing boiler failures (extensive corrosion and scale formation), maximizing the utilization of steam condensate, effective internal boiler water chemistry control to prevent entering pernicious impurities into the boiler and mitigating cost-prohibitive maintenance are the major positive consequences of a well-designed boiler feedwater treatment process. Despite the decisive roles of boiler water treatment methods in critical industries, scholarly literature suffers from the absence of an exhaustive review paper in this regard. Hence, this paper studies the main fundamentals of boiler feedwater treatment and various disconcerting challenges associated with the inadequate treatment of boiler feedwater. Also, performance enhancements, boiler maintenance, and cost analysis are thoroughly discussed. Based on the results, because almost all of the current operational boilers are powered by fossil fuels which emit significant quantities of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, advanced methods are required to decrease heat losses by recovery from flue gas and condensed water, and also alternative and eco-friendly fuel sources must be explored. In this regard, the authors propose the knowledge gaps and perspectives to delineate the future research direction concerning environmental-engineering-energy aspects. It concludes that despite some significant progress in the field of boiler water treatment, there is still a long way ahead to completely curb the pernicious feedwater-related challenges of the boiler. Therefore, intensive research efforts must be materialized to effectively mitigate or even remove these impediments.