Steam condensers by nature include a large volume of tubes. For one cogeneration power plant in New York,that means over 4,000 tubes for the condenser serving the 25-megawatt steam turbine. Keeping those tubes clean is a big job with regular maintenance, but can be near impossible when something goes wrong. But we had a chemistry issue. A chemical vendor gave us a little bad advice. The long and the short of it is, we had a calcium breakthrough in our cooling tower basin. So we had some fallout from this calcium that eventually plated out the tubes of the condenser."The plant quickly began to lose efficiency and they were unable to clean it mechanically."

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