Home > Products > by Industry > Power Generation > Fossil Fuel

Fossil Fuel

The continued utilization of the aging Power Generation infrastructure and increased focus of management for productivity and profitability has lead to "lean construction and manufacturing", meaning the extension of the useful life of assets and minimum downtime, achieved via predictive Maintenance and NDT. Main components within Fossil Fuel Power plants that require NDT inspection are Boilers, Headers, Steam lines, Turbines, Feedwater Heaters and Condensers. Techniques used for such applications include radiography and flaw detection, but there is an increasing trend to towards Phased Array Ultrasonic Testing due to the scans acheived from large cross-section of the test piece from a single probe location and the real time results.

The reason for inspection depends on the component and its effect on plant operation; some may cause unexpected outages eg boiler tubes.  Inspection of turbines must be adhered to for safety and operational reasons.  Further specific applications include: Main steam line CMV welds, Vessel Inspection and Boiler Tube Inspection.

The advanced thickness logging option on the Sitescan D+ Series allows for easy reporting and storage of boiler tube thickness surveys measurements.  The Sitescan 250 has the ultrasonic performance required for CMV weld inspection, due to the advanced split DAC feature.

Fossil fuel boilers suffer from problems associated with internal scaling preventing easy tube thickness measurement; this can be alleviated by using the Sonatest EMAT and Masterscan Flaw Detector Series.