I am a seasoned Mechanical Engineer, however, most of my 15 years experience has been on the nuclear side of power generation.  I am leading a very small team to evaluate and improve soot blowing performance on a boiler with PRB coal.  As you might imagin, I am on a steep learing curve to understand soot blowing, performance measurements and practices.  I am also going to a soot blowing symposium by an equipment manufacturer in a couple of weeks.

I am looking for advice on sources of information to help me get up to speed on keeping the boiler tubes clear of ash build-up.

Going to the symposium is probably your best introduction into getting the basics of soot blowing. After that, it really comes down to experience. We have been burning 100% PRB for about 10 years in our boilers, and what I have found out is optimization of soot blowing is learned on the job.

As a side note, our thermal performance engineers have been working with software to determine the cleanliness factor before and after soot blowing to optimize the frequency of blowing.

Don't forget one thing about the OEM boiler designers.  Basically they wanted that thing to make its performance at initial commercial operation testing, and to survive the one year warranty period.  Past that; it is your baby.

Other than that, unless someone at your utility prepared a cracker jack specification, what you have there is the best equipment 'low bid' can buy.

You have to look at it from that perspective.  This is totally unlike the nuclear side where uh-oh's can get you names like Three Mile Island or Cheyrnoble, and there is a NRC type entity looking over your shoulder for reliability and safety.  No gov't entity cares if you melt your boiler or not, and most state's PUC's rules are written so that you can pass your combustion inefficiencies right through to your rate payers.

There are companies out there whose whole existence comprises of making better mouse traps to improve the performance of all types of OEM equipment, including utility boilers.  Some call them pirates, and some are no more than pirates in that they are copy cats making inferior stuff.  Some, however end up with improvements so significant that the OEMs themselves have to go back and incorporate them into their designs in order to keep the aftermarket people from taking all their business/Filter.

Some of the links I gave earlier in this thread are for companies that offer goods and services that vastly improve what the OEM's had to offer.  Maybe the OEM's have responded by now with their own offerings, but your boiler may or may not have had some of those features incorporated yet.

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