Waste-to-energy (WTE) facilities in Canada face innumerable challenges including waste segregation, lowering operating costs and improving economic feasibility of the facility. However, one of the biggest challenges is to improve the efficiency of their plant whilst protecting the environment.
Boilers tubes that are used during waste combustion are prone to be deteriorated in corrosive, erosive, high-heat and impactful environment. Although the metal coatings on the boiler tubes are doing a fair job, there’s room for improvement.
TMetal has partnered with professors and post-doc students from the University of Toronto to carry out research and development for upgrading the metal powders coated on the boiler tubes. We aim to upgrade the benchmark product being used in the waste-to-energy facilities – the Inconel 625.
The project aims to improve heat resistance, corrosion resistance and impact resistance of the boiler tubes to help improve the efficiency of the waste-to-energy plant while producing more renewable energies and protecting the environment at the same time.
The Need for Better Metal Powders for Waste-to-Energy Plants
The presence of impurities such as chloride salts and HCl in the combustion gases means that the boiler tubes experience extremely high corrosion rates. Here at TMetal, we are committed to develop special metal coatings with stellar features including:
- Extremely high-heat, corrosion, oxidation, and impact resistance
- Excellent fatigue & thermal-fatigue strength
- High rupture, tensile and creep strength
These features bring an increasing efficiency of the waste-to-energy sector by extending service life of the boiler tubes. Ultimately, reducing downtime and maintenance expenditures.
We Expect Our Project Will Benefit Canadian Community
As a Canadian-based company, we hope our innovative products allow more waste-to-energy facilities to be widely implemented with lower costs across Canada, generating more water and electricity, providing enough heating to the households, and recycling more metals. We are also expecting a broader impact on mitigation of the climate change as waste-to-energy facilities are good substitutes of landfills that do not reuse and recycle waste materials and emit greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Additionally, we hope our products can be introduced to many other industries that experience same wear problems, such as oil & gas, lumber, automotive, and aerospace.
