Proposed paper: Linking NDE to component life-cycle decisions for fossil power plants
In the changing US utility industry, competition for customers is placing ever increasing pressure to reduce operating and maintenance costs for generating facilities. A key challenge in this cost-cutting process is to obtain such reductions without compromising plant safety or reliability. To meet such a challenge will require a much tighter coupling of component inspection activities with decisions on component life. Past utility practices for fossil units have focused on performing periodic inspections and then reacting to any findings from such inspections. In the current environment, the process needs to provide a close integration of NDE activities with the component damage models to ensure an optimal program of where to inspect, how to inspect, and when to inspect. This paper will review current state-of-activities and provide recommendations on achieving such an integrated process. An example case will be developed for a typical, fossil plant, high temperature header. Visualization software is becoming an everyday tool in NDE. However, it has never been so difficult to find a package that fulfills the needs of a research laboratory. Issues such as price, availability for a given platform, learning curves make the choice even harder. This paper describes our experience at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with various visualization packages. We will show how the problems encountered with large data sets led us to use popular scripting languages such as Tcl/Tk or Perl. By coupling these languages with standard toolkits as XLib and OpenGL, powerful, flexible, user-friendly and machine-independent tools can be designed rapidly. We will describe X-ray CT industrial and biomedical applications that made use of this approach, and show how their requirements were taken into account.
- OSTI ID:
- 563463
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-960324--
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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