Unsteady thermal and mechanical loading in turbine components is caused due to the transient regimes arising during start-ups and shut-downs and due to changes in the operating regime in steam power plants; this results in nonuniform strain and stress distribution. Thus, an accurate knowledge of the stresses caused by various loading conditions is required to ensure the integrity and to ensure an accurate life assessment of the components of a turbine. Although the materials of the components of the steam turbine deform inelastically at a high temperature, currently, only elastic calculations are performed for safety and simplicity. Numerous models have been proposed to describe the viscoplastic (timedependent) behavior; these models are rather elaborate and it is difficult to incorporate them into a finite element code in order to simulate the loading of complex structures. In this paper, the total lifetime of the components of a steam turbine was calculated by combining the viscoplastic constitutive equation with the ABAQUS finite element code. Viscoplastic analysis was conducted by focusing mainly on simplified constitutive equations with linear kinematic hardening, which is simple enough to be used effectively in computer simulation. The von Mises stress distribution of an HIP turbine rotor was calculated during the cold start-up operation of the rotor, and a reasonable number of cycles were obtained from the equation of Langer.

An important characteristic of a fossil power plant is its ability to maintain reliability and safety of the plant against frequent start-ups and load changes. Unstable states arising during start-ups, shutdowns and load changes give rise to unsteady temperature distribution with time in steam turbine innercasing (HP/IP), which results in non-uniform strain and stress distribution. The rapid increase of temperature during starts-ups, especially, causes susceptible to failure and reduction of expected life for steam turbine components. Thus accurate knowledge of thermal stresses is required for the integrity and lifetime assessment for the turbine components. In this paper, the fatigue damage is calculated of steam turbine inner casing was calculated by combining the stress analysis based procedure and Neuber's rule. By substituting the material cyclic stress-strain relationship into the Neuber equation, the inelastic total strain range was obtained. Using this study, life consumption of steam turbine inner-casing can be obtained and a guideline for effective maintenance was proposed.

No abstract

No abstract

The high-temperature steam pipes of thermal power plants are subjected to severe conditions such as creep and fatigue due to the power plant frequently being started up and shut down. To prevent critical pipes from serious damage and possible failure, inspection methods such as computational analysis and online piping displacement monitoring have been developed. However, these methods are limited in that they cannot determine the life consumption rate of a critical pipe precisely.Therefore, we set out to develop a life assessment system, based on a three-dimensional piping displacement monitoring system, which is capable of evaluating the life consumption rate of a critical pipe. This system was installed at the "M" thermal power plant in Malaysia, and was shown to operate well in practice. The results of this study are expected to contribute to the increase safety of piping systems by minimizing stress and extending the actual life of critical piping.