Steam Piping Care!

Steam pipings!
Whenever one sees steam pipings around the plant, or in your apartments/ residential buildings, they would look ordinary and seem to be just like any other kinds of water pipes, but they are not. They have very special design thoughts incorporated in them, and if not maintained properly, a lot of inefficiencies could result, as well as various types of problems, like corrosion, water logging, water hammer, and early failure. Steam pipings are lagged with insulation materials and the insulation materials are protected from being soaked with water by sheet metal claddings. If the insulation is soaked in water, you can be sure that the heat loss could increase by as much as 50x compared to heat loss from a pipe giving heat directly to dry air. Bare hot pipes are also very costly in terms of operating costs. Whenever, the insulation therefore are damaged, they should be repaired immediately, and the insulation properly replaced.

So, why do we need extra care to make sure the hot pipes are well insulated? There are several reasons for this. The first one is prevention of energy loss or heat dissipation along the pipeline, so that the heat reaches its point of application. The other reason is for safety or protection of personnel. The next reason is to avoid too much condensation along the pipeline, which may overload the steam traps that remove the condensates from the system, and the fourth one is to make your operation for your particular application effective.and efficient. Note also that water in the pipeline creates water hammer that can cause a pipeline to be damaged.

There are also other things put by the designer in your piping system. Some of these include pipe alignments designed to drain the condensate in the direction of the steam flow; expansion system to keep the line from breaking during heat ups and cool downs; pipe supports that maintain pipe grade and alignments; steam trap system using different principles in engineering like temperature actuated or condensate level actuated devices, and some other different combination of principles based on these two design principles; and air removal systems or dryness maintaining devices for your steam quality safeguards. Frequent inspection and audits need be undertaken to check on these specific designed items, and replacement of fittings and devices need be initiated to ensure the most economical operation of the system once found damaged or defective. An energy conservation engineer or a steam piping expert should be able to determine this properly for you. If you need one, you can ask around from your local association of mechanical engineers or energy management engineers.
You can also email the undersigned at sanysue@lycos.com for any questions you have.
Written by: Sanoy Suerte, RME/MBM; http://www.linkedin.com/in/sannysuerte; http://businessmanage.sosblog.com