Hi Noah.
Maybe a little late but here goes. I’m not a specialist in the area myself but I have a colleague or two and I ask them since it’s quite an interesting problem.
We don’t know if the problem is with the DA. Here’s why…
We have tray types DA’s at an old station of ours (wet cooled) – 1960s. These particular trays have a lot of vibration and are on fairly small brackets and mostly break out later. As the trays failed in one of the units we simply took them out. At the end there were only one or two trays left (probably 6 months back), but the DA still worked as he should do with DO’s in spec. We believe the saturated conditions in the DA with condensate falling from the top with a reasonable spread (1 tray) are sufficient…
Having said that no one really knows exactly what’s going on in the DA. This specific DAs had two tanks, each 50m^3 each. You have condensates and distillates that come in, feed water suction that goes off, RFT filling in, balancing lines between the two tanks above and below, the vents that go out and then you try to control the level quite accurately by adding more water in the condenser or dumping condensate to the RFT i.e. many things going on!
To answer the question, we’ve noted ASME PTC 12.3: Performance Test Code on Deaerators. We’ll start there.
