Oh gosh. Another sign of the decline of American Machine Technology.
I just finished starting up a power plant in western Virginia - the entire building framing AND the boiler drum (and who knows how much of the rest of the boiler) were made in CHINA! I know about the boiler drum because of 160 welded nozzle stubs attached to the drum fully 75 percent of them were defective welds - and couldn't pass the first hydro inspection. Thank our lucky stars for ASME requirements - otherwise we would have never found the issue! The drum ended up being ground out/re-welded IN PLACE and then heat treat/annealed in place (a bigger job than the welding for sure.) Chinese quality?
Almost everything seems made in China today. Walmart used to be Sam Walton's Pride in America store. And had an American flag displayed prominently somewhere near the cash registers. Now it's Chinamart. No flag.
Sad days we're coming to methinks. I have my handbasket ready.
I wonder what my children will do for a living?
Joe in NH
Joe if it makes you feel any better the loss of steam drum manufacturing in the USA had a silver lining. When Alstom sold off the steam drum line here's what they put in its place;
http://www.waldrich-siegen.de/fileadmin/download/newsflash/WaldrichSiegen_012011e.pdf
On June 24, 2010, Alstom inaugurated
a new manufacturing
facility in Chattanooga, USA. At
their new facility, Alstom will manufacture
steam turbines, gas
turbines, large turbo-generators
and related equipment for the
North American power industry.
The business activities include
production of new turbines as
well as the retrofitting of existing
turbines with leading edge technology.
The Chattanooga facility is equipped
with three state-of-the-art
WaldrichSiegen ProfiTurn machines.
These include the largest
horizontal lathe ever built, type
DH 7000/350 x 25.000 allowing
a turning diameter of 7.000 mm.
This machine accommodates
workpiece weights up to 350
tons.
WaldrichSiegen exemplifies the
high-precision manufacture of
machine tools. With efficiency
and ease, the supplied Profi-
Turn lathes machine the world’s
largest steam turbines, Alstom’s
ARABELLE™ 1,700 MW.
To guarantee precision machining
and obtain accuracies within the
µ range, the headstock is equipped
with a double x-axis, which
provides for minimal deflections
on the x-axis travel distance of
3.600 mm.
In all reality the truth to the matter is that with USA emissions laws and low natural gas prices the chances of us building a lot of steam drums in this country is pretty slim, when I was working for Alstom in 2008-2010, right before the bottom on the natural gas market fell out they were putting the finishing touches on the last 3-4 new big boilers they had on the books for US orders, of those only one of them which was a CFB actually had a steam drum. The rest of them were all going with supercritical units that don't need one.
So while China is building 100+ boilers a year many with drums still in them, the US going forward may not be building any, so I think it was a good decision and I think getting the steam turbine mfg plant in its place left this country with the better end of the trade. Here's some good photos for those interested from my book "Combustion" of the making of these steam drums.
At the same time though the plant at least as of when I was through it back in 2009 still makes lots of water walls, headers and large patten assemblies so they are making the parts that are in demand, and get replaced on a regular basis. While headers, water walls, and plattens go all the time, I have never heard of a plant replacing a steam drum! I don't know what things are like today as I have been out of the industry 3 years now, but I know there were many customers who went with the Chinese parts, many sold by an old name USA company and lost all of their savings in the first few outages due to early tube failures, only to come back to Alstom's Chattanooga plant.
By the way on the Chinese boiler quality I don't understand it. When I was at Alstom they hired a real good engineer who was a pleasure to work with who had come from TXU where he worked as a customer's engineer at the Chinese "Bomb Factory" that was his name for the plant. I think its more formal name was Harbin Boiler works, but I could have the wrong plant. None the less he told me it blew his mind he said it was all the simple things that the Chinese didn't do that made all the difference. Apparently according to him the Chinese have 3 boiler codes, #1 is Chinese Boiler code (aka. stay the hell away!
) #2 Chinese version of "ASME Code" (see #1) #3 Chinese ASME code with customer's rep watching each part through production!
In this guy's time at the plant I think he counted about 10,000MW of steam boilers going out the door to give you an idea of scale and how hard of a time it is to compete with them. None the less he was saying stuff like heat treating a header, the Chinese would have a huge header over 100ft long covered in thermal blankets, with 1 thermocouple monitoring the whole heating!
Apparently it took quite a fight to get them to tear it down and put in more sensors. He said it blew his mind that on a part likely worth $1million that they weren't willing to spend the money on the added thermocouples! On the other hand he said their welders were some of the best he ever seen who did beautiful welds, only to have the factory cheap shot the finishing touches. He said the sad thing is the difference between doing it right and doing it the Chinese way wasn't too much. It is just unbelievable especially with the government spending so much money on that stuff that there is no real effort made to do it right.
At any rate, sorry for hijacking the tread. I hope a few people enjoyed it.