What Should a Good Internal Water Treatment Programme Accomplish?
The purpose of an internal treatment programme is fourfold: (1) react with any feed-water hardness and prevent it from pre-cipitating on the boiler metal as scale, (2) condition any sus-pended matter such as hardness sludge or iron oxide in the boiler and make it non-adherent to the boiler metal, (3) provide anti-foam protection to permit a reasonable concentration of dissolved and suspended solids in the boiler water without foam carry-over, and (4) eliminate oxygen from the water and provide enough alka-linity to prevent boiler corrosion. In addition, as supplementary measures an internal treatment should prevent corrosion and scaling of the feed-water system and protect againts corrosion in the steam-condensate systems.
