On line fatigue life monitoring methodology for power plant components

Fatigue is one of the most important aging effects of power plant components. Information about fatigue helps in assessing structural degradation of the components and so assists in planning in-service inspection and maintenance. It may also support the future life extension programme of a power plant. In the present paper, the development of a methodology for on line fatigue life monitoring using available plant instrumentation is presented. The Green's function technique is used to convert plant data to stress-time data. Using a rainflow cycle counting method, stress-time data are analysed and the fatigue usage factor is computed from the material fatigue curve. Various codes are developed to generate Green's functions, to convert plant data to stress-time data, to find the fatigue usage factor and to display fatigue information. Using the developed codes, information about the fatigue life of various components of a power plant can be updated, stored and displayed interactively by plant operators.

Three different case studies are reported in the present paper. These are the fatigue analyses of a thick pipe, of a nozzle connected to a pressure vessel and of a reducer connecting a heat exchanger to its piping system.