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6. SAFETY
No matter what your application or your end use is, safety is a major concern in any business environment. Your boiler, by its very definition, is a pressure vessel, and contains a massive amount of water that is being brought up to a high pressure. Depending on the size of your boiler, that pressure can contain the same explosive potential as a bomb, and there have been countless examples dating back to the industrial revolution of boiler explosions that have gone off with enough force to level a building. When the safety of your employees, not to mention your property is at stake, you can’t be too careful when it comes to safety. Certainly your boiler has several safety stops in place to keep this from happening, but what happens if those measures were to fail?
Dating back to our inception in 1930, there has never been an explosion in a Clayton Steam Generator, even during controlled tests where the safety stops were intentionally deactivated. This comes down to two features of our design.
The first is our low water content. As mentioned in some of our previous articles, Clayton keeps a comparably low water volume in our boilers, and a low water volume minimizes explosive potential. In the case of a firetube boiler, you’re bringing a massive amount of water up to temperature all at the same time, all contained in the same boiler shell, and all of it pressurized. In the event of a rupture of any kind, the explosive potential of all of this energy releasing simultaneously can be catastrophic, as opposed to Clayton’s low volume, water tube design.
The second feature has to do with our wound coil tube. In the unlikely event of a leak in the coil, the energy contained within the steam can’t be released quickly. The steam would have to travel through the coils to reach the source of the leak, which emerges as a slow trickle, in contrast to a massive explosion yielded from allowing it all to escape at once. In addition, the coil is contained inside of the boiler’s insulated shell, where it harmlessly exits through the exhaust stack and into the atmosphere. Not only will the steam never come into contact with you, your employees, or your plant, but your boiler will likely continue to operate, despite the leak.
Due to these design features, as well as numerous other safety stops and alarm systems, there has never been an explosion in a Clayton Steam Generator, and there never will be. When it comes to your safety, the simple question is this: Do you want a boiler that has the potential to explode, or one that doesn’t?