Flue-gas Cleaning

In today’s flue gas cleaning systems with advanced energy recovery systems and improved flue gas cleaning, the use of polymeric materials has continuously increased in applications where the flue gas environment is to corrosive to be handled with metallic materials. Typical polymeric materials used are fibre reinforced plastics (FRP), glassflake-filled linings, polypropylene (PP) and fluoropolymers. Demands on increased profitability och efficiency at incineration plants involve that also polymeric materials have to face more demanding environments with increased temperature, temperature changes, changes in fuel composition and therewith fluegas composition and longer service intervals. The knowledge on how polymeric materials perform in general and how these service conditions influence them, is, however, poor and continuous status assessment is therefore necessary. 

In our work within the flue-gas cleaning industry we have assessed simple techniques for status assessment of polymeric materials in flue gas cleaning equipment and to perform an inventory of present experience and knowledge on the use of polymeric materials. We have also made an inventory of present experience, analysis of material from shut-down plants and plants still in service, field testing in a plant adding sulphur during combustion and the assessment of different non-destructive testing (NDT) methods by laboratory experiments.