An Improved Test Facility for Studying Deposit Fouling on Steam Turbine Blades

A laboratory scale test facility has been developed to investigate deposition in steam turbines under conditions that are representative of those in steam power generation cycles. The facility is an advanced two-reactor vessel test arrangement, which is a more flexible and more accurately controllable refinement to the single reactor vessel test arrangement described previously in ASME Paper No. GT2014-25517 [1]. The commissioning of the new test facility is described in this paper, together with the results from a series of tests over a range of steam conditions, which show the effect of steam conditions (particularly steam pressure) on the amount and type of deposits obtained. Comparisons are made between the test results and feedback/experience of copper fouling in real machines.© 2016 ASME