Energy efficient boiler
Your report on the use of energy efficient boilers, published on 6 January, is a generalised logical statement. To make the industrialists interested to convert their boilers (if possible) more cost benefit advantages should have been spelled out. A simple statement that a 10 ton/hour boiler raising saturated steam at 10bar if replaced by an efficient boiler would cost say Tk.10 lakh, and the fuel saving per annum would be Tk 1 lakh indicates a pay back period of ten years.
However, the statement as reported was (quote): "Factory owners can save 77mmcft of gas daily by converting all boilers" is neither here nor there! It does not give any idea of the cost involved in making an inefficient boiler more efficient, and an idea of the payback period would have been more realistic and more convincing. Far more effective would have been a table giving these data for a number of low-pressure boilers from say 5bar to 15bar operating pressure with capacities ranging in steps from 5 to 20 tons/hour.
Another approach to saving would have been to modify the boiler's fuel firing set-up and change the fuel, i.e. coal, oil or gas to say twigs and wood shavings or rice husk as substituted fuel. This can be done locally, as no modification is involved in the pressure side of the boiler. Changes would be made in fuel feeding system and the combustion chamber. If we can change say a diesel-fired boiler of 5ton/hour capacity to rice husk, producing saturated steam at 10bar, savings of operating costs by 40 to 50 percent can be easily possible, if rice husk is available within 25 miles of the boiler location.
This needs to be tried out in all seriousness and is based on the writer's experience in such modification work at a factory near Rajbari which was run on diesel fuel as gas or coal was not available there.
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