After about six to seven months of fabrication and more than 1,000 welded joints, boiler bank No. 6 was certified and lifted with an 80-tonne crane for escorted transport to the smelter.
At the LTF shop in Concón, fabrication of boiler bank No. 6 for the boiler of the Chuquicamata smelter was completed: a unit of about 13 tonnes, made up of more than 1,000 welded joints of boiler tubes shipped from Argentina.
Fabrication took about six to seven months and the unit passed all quality certifications before dispatch. Given the characteristics of the lift, the maneuver was performed with an 80-tonne crane and the bank was loaded onto a lowboy truck to travel under escort to the smelter.
Once at Chuquicamata, the bank is installed in the boiler to replace the existing one, extending the service life and durability of the equipment. LTF thus closes a project delivered with the expected quality and is ready to take part in new challenges of this scale.
In numbers
- 13 t Weight of boiler bank No. 6
- 80 t Lifting crane capacity
- +1,000 Boiler tube welded joints
- 6 to 7 months Fabrication, certification and dispatch
- 1.4 Mt/yr Smelting capacity of the smelter (middle of the last decade)
- 135 days Major boiler shutdown in 2022 (Diario Financiero)
Context
The Chuquicamata smelter, in Calama, is Codelco’s largest: around the middle of the last decade it had a smelting capacity of 1.4 million tonnes per year, and it operates with one flash furnace, two Teniente converters and three Peirce-Smith converters. The flash furnace waste heat boiler recovers energy from the metallurgical off-gases, and its tube banks are the heart of that heat exchange.
Since 2020 the smelter recorded an increase in the failure rate from tube ruptures in the Flash Furnace boiler, which affected its availability in 2021 and 2022. In November 2022 it entered a 135-day major maintenance shutdown in which about 50% of the boiler heat exchange surface was replaced, as reported by Diario Financiero. A new bank, fabricated and certified at the shop, is what extends the service life of the equipment between shutdowns.
What was said on the record
Quotes translated from Spanish.
“What you see behind me is boiler bank number 6, which we are fabricating for Chuquicamata. It has to be equipment of these characteristics because the lift is quite delicate: there are many parts inside the boiler bank.”Dispatch record, LTF shop, Concón
“This project has been completed successfully, it has passed all the quality certifications, and we are loading it so it can head to the smelter, where it is installed in the boiler and replaces the existing one to give the equipment more life and durability.”Dispatch record, LTF shop, Concón