Dolphin Retubes Steam Plant Condenser with 2,800 Titanium Tubes

A steam power plant in the UAE had seen its surface condenser lose back-pressure performance over successive operating seasons, driven by tube-side fouling and localised corrosion that a mechanical clean alone could no longer resolve. In power generation, every millibar of back-pressure lost to a degraded condenser translates directly into lost heat rate and megawatts the plant cannot recover through operations alone.

Dolphin's retubing crew removed and replaced 2,800 titanium condenser tubes during a planned outage, selected for their resistance to the cooling water chemistry that had degraded the original tube material over the unit's service life. Titanium's corrosion resistance across the plant's actual water chemistry — rather than a generic material spec — was the deciding factor in the material selection review ahead of the outage.

The retubing sequence was planned tube-row by tube-row to keep the outage inside its scheduled window, with tubesheet re-rolling and expansion verified on a sample basis before the full bundle was signed off — a quality control step that catches a systematic rolling defect before it becomes 2,800 individual leak paths in service.

The retubed condenser was hydrotested and returned to service within the outage window, with the unit restored to its full original design capacity and back-pressure performance verified against commissioning data — confirming the plant had recovered heat rate lost gradually over several preceding operating seasons.