Evaluation of retrofitting a conventional natural gas fired boiler into a condensing boiler

The exit flue gas temperature of a conventional gas fired boiler is usually high and a great amount of heat energy is lost to the environment. If both sensible heat and latent heat can be recovered by adding a condensing heat exchanger, the efficiency of the boiler can be increased by as much as 10%. In this paper, based on combustion and heat transfer calculations, the recoverable heat and the efficiency improvement potential of different heat recovery schemes at various exit flue gas temperatures are presented by performing design calculations. The payback period method has been used to analyze the feasibility of retrofitting a conventional gas fired boiler into a condensing boiler in a heating system in detail. The results show that the most economical exit flue gas temperature is 40-55 degreesC when a conventional natural gas fired boiler is retrofitted into a condensing boiler simply by adding a condensing heat exchanger. It is feasible to use the return water of a heating system as the cooling medium of the condensing heat exchanger because the return temperature varies with the ambient temperature and is lower than the dew point of the water vapor in the flue gas in most periods of a heating season in some regions, which has been verified by retrofitted case. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.