Condensate Recovery FAQ

            •  Can I recover 100% of my recoverable condensate?

Many places nowadays face water scarcity and quality of water is also not upto the mark. Raw water quality plays an important role in the economics of steam generation. High TDS or high hardness in water demands proper treatment of water and high costs may be incurred. Also heating feed water requires heat energy to be supllied. Thus to reduce all the water material and heat costs, all the recoverable condensate or rather the valuable heat energy can be recovered in different ways. The best arrangement is to return it to the boiler house, where it can be used as boiler feed water without any further treatment, saving fuel, raw water and chemicals needed for boiler feed water     treatment. You can also use the condensate as hot process water, so you use the important enthalpy for heating coils or heat exchange units. Alternatively, it is common practice in plating processes to run the condensate directly into hot rinse tanks. This provides the hot water necessary for final rinsing of articles that have been treated and produces a saving of live steam that would otherwise be needed to heat the water.

• What is flash steam and how to recover it?

When hot condensate under pressure is released to a lower pressure, its temperature must drop very quickly to the boiling point for the lower pressure as shown in the steam tables. The surplus heat is utilized by the condensate as enthalpy of evaporation, causing some of it to re-evaporate into steam. This steam is called "flash steam". The best way to recover and utilize flash steam is to let the steam and condensate mixture pass through what is known as a Flash Vessel. The flash vessel separates the steam from the condensate, so there is some additional steam you can use for your process vessels as well.

• What should I know about recovering condensate and flash steam?

The condensate is much too valuable to drain it, so it is to lead back to the feed water tank and/or to flash it, so that the whole heat energy is re-used. One other essential is obviously a supply of condensate at a reasonable high pressure. The traps supplying this condensate must be able to accept the back pressure which will be created by the operating pressure of the flash steam system. For the back pressure it is also important that the condensate and flash steam pipes have the correct size. The condensate should also flow by gravity, the return lines should also have the correct gradient. Unfortunately it is rarely possible to return condensate by gravity back to the boiler feed tank. For this reason, it is usual to run condensate to a collecting point from which it can be pumped back to the boiler house with a Steam Pressure Powered Pump .

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