By design, boiler and piping pressure parts are intended to be inspected at regular intervals. Tetra Engineering can help your O&M staff with pre-outage planning for your boiler/HRSG inspection and to provide on-site supervision and surveillance. The goal is to ensure that the applied resources and outage time are used to achieve the most value. The inspection tasks can be chosen using engineering judgement or by relying on supporting engineering analyses by Tetra Engineering, such as a remaining life assessment.
While some damage mechanisms can be detected visually, others are often best discovered (or at least confirmed) with various NDE methods, these mechanisms include:
- Fatigue & Corrosion Fatigue Cracking
- Creep and Thermal Degradation of Steel
- Flow-Accelerated Corrosion (FAC) and Fluid Erosion
- Underdeposit Corrosion
Therefore another key objective for inspection planning is the optimal targeting of inspection locations for your in-house or external contractors’ inspection NDE crew. NDE contractors are expensive and they often don’t know your plant or process well enough to target locations on components that are most at-risk for degradation and wear. If they inspect in the wrong places (i.e. where the rate of wear/damage is not highest), they can give the plant operator a false sense of security. Tetra Engineering has the requisite multi-disciplinary experience and tools (thermal simulation, life assessment, structural calculations….) in-house to help you get the most out of your NDE campaigns, by selecting the locations that are most susceptible to damage, according to your components’ design and the way they are operated.
