Development and Application of a Short-Time Probe for Measuring Carryover in a Recovery Boiler

Traditional air-cooled carryover probes, while excellent for research and longer term studies, do not lend themselves readily for use by mill operators. The main objective of this work was to develop and calibrate an un-cooled short-time probe technique that could quickly estimate the deposit accumulation rate in a recovery boiler The deposits on the probe surface were photographed after exposure, and the photos were analyzed with image processing software. The degree of particle coverage on the probe surface was converted to correspond to the long-term air-cooled probe results. A reference series for the short-time probe was created. This can be easily used by the boiler operators simply by comparing the short-time probe surface after the measurement with the reference image series, and converting the obtained degree of particle hit coverage to carryover concentration in the flue gas. New information on the particle size variations was obtained from the short-time probe images.