Industrial boilers are especially important mechanical systems that are used for various operations in industry. Their main objective is to heat up water to elevated temperatures to either convert it to steam through the evaporation process which is mostly used in power generation plants or provide elevated temperature water as output to the other parts of buildings or plants such as paint plants in automotive industry companies. Efficiency is a key aspect in boilers due to the high demand in production that they need to fulfil. Through numerous factors, boilers experience heat/energy losses which be monitored and rectified through several ways identified in this paper.

This study focuses on a boiler used at Sasol Synfuels Power Station which uses Pulverized coal as the fuel to fire it up. Dry flue gases, moisture content formation of water from hydrogen, radiation, convection, fly and bottom ash are the factors that contribute to heat losses in boiler and later causes the efficiency of the boiler to decrease. In this scenario, heat losses increase in a period of 5 days of study and causes a decrease in efficiency from of 91.05% to 87.08%. This is determined with the use of data collected and the application of specified formulas. Another leading factor to this efficiency decrease is the increase of the Gross Calorific Value from 14322 KJ/kg and end point of 14279 KJ/kg.

To improve the heat losses in this boiler, a feasible reactive maintenance strategy must be chosen and improvements such as using an air preheater is considered because it decreases the flu gas temperature. Gross Calorific value must be increased to attain increasing efficiency.