Abstract
Over the last thirty years, many industrial installations including coal and gas fired power plants, smelters, oil production facilities and chemical plants have been forced to reduce or eliminate the discharge of wastewater outside the plant boundaries, using evaporators and crystallizers. Both processes are thermal processes often operating at or near the atmospheric boiling point and can involve processing water containing high levels of dissolved sodium chloride, calcium chloride, magnesium chloride and other species with a high corrosion potential. Three case studies are presented where major materials failures occurred. Often these can be linked to the cycling of feed chemical constituents as they are concentrated through the evaporation-crystallization process.
