Is Lime Souring Your Valve Operation?

Lime is used by a large majority of the chemical process industries in either a powder or liquid form. Engineering and maintenance personnel often face a long ," and potentially expensive ," trial-and-error process to find the best process equipment to handle lime.

Limestone is mined from a quarry as calcium carbonate (CaCO3). It then is crushed and fed into a kiln at approximately 2,000 Degrees F, where the carbon dioxide is burned off (calcining) to make calcium oxide (CaO).

CaO is ground to a powder in either a tower mill, spiral classifier or slaker. Milk of lime is used for many industrial purposes, including pH control, power flue-gas cleansing, calcium extraction in pharmaceutical manufacturing and more. One of the most common uses is in the chemical process industry is pH control.

The reason lime is so difficult to handle in piping systems, instrumentation and valves is that lime particles are very jagged. Lime does not dissolve, but instead is merely suspended in solution. Any cracks, crevices or void areas will cause the lime particles to fall out of suspension and fill these voids. Lime further aggravates this situation when it hardens in these collection points. The lime changes its state to a solid mass of material ," commonly referred to as scaling. Scaling causes a pipeline's inner diameter to become smaller and smaller. Material buildup on valve seats and other surfaces can cause the valves to freeze in position.

Process equipment, instrumentation and valves selected for use in lime slurry systems should limit cavities, cracks and void areas. Even a small collection point can cause equipment failure and countless hours of downtime and maintenance.

The ideal product for use in lime slurry should have the ability to clean itself or break apart scale and also should be completely free of void spaces or cavities. If any piping product is to be installed in a lime slurry system, it should be full port as well to limit obstruction or potential lime slurry buildup.

A common suggestion for increasing valve performance in lime slurry systems while using plug and ball valves is to use an actuator that is significantly oversized. The actuator size is increased, so the actuator output capability is roughly two times the normal manufacturer's recommended torque requirement in clean liquids.

Actuator oversizing might improve performance or decrease downtime resulting from sticking valves, but it will not solve all related maintenance problems. Because lime is very abrasive, many ball and plug valves will be affected severely by the lime. A stellite coating or another hardened material on the ball will help protect a valve against the abrasive nature of lime.

The seats also are a major concern. Again, hardened-steel seats with a scraping edge are probably your best alternative in lime applications. "Scraping" hard-coated metals will perform better in scaling substances because they have the ability to scrape built-up material off the ball and plug surfaces.

Most polymeric seats will not stand up over time in lime slurry. The scaling that occurs in these valves is like a wrecking ball to most polymeric seats. The ball or plug with scale buildup is turned through these seats, usually resulting in a short lifetime. Because ball and plug valves have cavity areas housing the ball or plug, a substantial amount of material will accumulate in this cavity area over time. If possible, you should install flushing ports in the valve so the body cavity area is flushed with water to clean out material accumulation after each cycle. This process will help minimize material buildup in the cavity area.

It can be expensive to build a ball or plug valve with all the above-mentioned features. The cost of a ball or plug valve equipped with these features can be five to six times that of a traditional Teflon-seated ball or plug valve. Unfortunately, however, most Teflon-seated ball or plug valves will not perform satisfactorily in lime slurry.

Gate and knife gate valves can be used in many slurry services. With many gate valves, however, you must be willing to sacrifice tight shutoff in lime slurry service. Most gate valves force the gate into a wedge area to close the valve.

Knife gate valves have a sharpened edge to improve the ability to cut through solid particles. In lime service, the seating area will be a spot for material accumulation. The lime will accumulate in this area, cause difficulties in valve operation and could prevent sealing the valve completely against the line pressure.

The ideal knife gate valve for lime service features a hard-surfaced leading knife edge. For surfacing, stellite or some other material capable of protecting the softer steel blade is used. Actuator forces in knife gates also should be increased to give the valve the ability to cut through or close tightly against the lime buildup in the wedge.

The knife of the knife gate will be exposed to scaling. The scale buildup on the knife most likely will result in packing problems in knife gates. The scale will accumulate on the valve's knife. As the knife is opened, the scale buildup will be dragged through the packing, requiring increased forces to open the valve. The packing also will be affected severely when this material is dragged across it. With most knife gates, you will experience significant packing leaks.