• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.848-859
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• 2016

System failures in thermal power plants (TPPs) can lead to serious losses because the equipment is operated under very high pressure and temperature. Therefore, it is indispensable for alarm systems to inform field workers in advance of any abnormal operating conditions in the equipment. In this paper, we propose a clustering-based fault detection method for steam boiler tubes in TPPs. For data clustering, k-means algorithm is employed and the number of clusters are systematically determined by slope statistic. In the clustering-based method, it is assumed that normal data samples are close to the centers of clusters and those of abnormal are far from the centers. After partitioning training samples collected from normal target systems, fault scores (FSs) are assigned to unseen samples according to the distances between the samples and their closest cluster centroids. Alarm signals are generated if the FSs exceed predefined threshold values. The validity of exponentially weighted moving average to reduce false alarms is also investigated. To verify the performance, the proposed method is applied to failure cases due to boiler tube leakage. The experiment results show that the proposed method can detect the abnormal conditions of the target system successfully.

• Plant Journal
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.53-61
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• 2010

This paper presents failure analysis on weld-joint of the waterwall tubes in USC boilers. Visual inspections were performed to find out the characteristics of the fracture. Additionally both microscopic characteristics and hardness test were carried out on failed tube samples. Failures seem to happen mainly because the welding process such as preheating and PWHT(post-weld heat treatment) was not conducted strictly. Thus, this paper has the purpose to describe the main cause of the poor welding process and to explain how to prevent similar failures in those weld-joints.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.30-36
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• 2015

Austenite stainless steel(SA213-TP347H) has widely been used for the superheater & reheater tube in USC(ultra-supercritica) coal boiler because of its high creep rupture strength and anti-oxidation. But recently, the short-term failures have happened frequently in heat affected zone for only 4,000~15,000hours of service. Many investigations have been conducted to understand the failure mechanism. The root cause of failure was comfirmed to "strain induce participation hardening crack" or "reheat cracking". This mechanism often occurred due to weld residual stress and precipitation of the Cr, Nb carbides in the stabilized stainless steel such as TP347H. This paper presents an analysis of failure tube and effect of the sample tubes that conducting stabilizing heat treatment in site after 11,380hours & 16,961hours of service. Visual inspection was performed. In addition, microscopic characteristics was identified by O.M, SEM, and hardness test was carried out to find out the heat treatment effects. Failures seem to happen because of being not conducted stabilizing heat treatment in site. And another cause is inadequate weld parameter such as pass, ampere, voltage, inter-pass temperature. Thus, this paper has the purpose to describe that how to prevent similar failures in those weld-joints.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers A
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• v.48 no.1
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• pp.44-51
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• 1999

This paper proposes a new approach of plant fault diagnosis which is based on detecting the characteristic pattern signals and associating them with the corresponding faults. The new approach does not require analytic modeling of the target system but best reflects the expertise embedded in the experienced human operation by mimicking them in a systematic way. This paper intends to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed by developing the algorithms to detect and estimate the typical characteristic pattern signals, I. e., oscillatory patterns, and applying them to the diagnosis of various faults of a 500MW boiler control system including tube rupture, feed-water leak, and controller failure.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.246-252
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• 2016

Since thermal power plant (TPP) equipment is operated under very high pressure and temperature, failures of the equipment give rise to severe losses of life and property. To prevent the losses, fault detection method is, therefore, absolutely necessary to identify abnormal operating conditions of the equipment in advance. In this paper, we present Mahalanobis distance (MD) based fault detection method for steam boiler tube in TPP. In the MD-based method, it is supposed that abnormal data samples are far away from normal samples. Using multivariate samples collected from normal target system, mean vector and covariance matrix are calculated and threshold value of MD is decided. In a test phase, after calculating the MDs between the mean vector and test samples, alarm signals occur if the MDs exceed the predefined threshold. To demonstrate the performance, a failure case due to boiler tube leakage in 200MW TPP is employed. The experimental results show that the presented method can perform early detection of boiler tube leakage successfully.

• Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.157-166
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• 2009

The pulverized coal combustion behavior in the coal fired utility boiler has been investigated with the CFD and process analysis techniques. The used commercial software were CFX and PROATES, and these were coupled each other to get more reliable boundary condition set-up, resulting in more reliable solution. For two cases which were the actual operation condition of A power plant, the calculated values from the coupled CFD and process analysis for thermal energy system were compared with the plant data, and the good agreements were obtained for Case 1 and 2. The calculated temperature distributions on the surface of heat exchangers were compared with the plant data for the steam temperatures across heat exchangers, and these explained the actual operating situation very well. The temperature deviation across the final superheater tube, which was believed to be the main cause of the frequent tube failure, were also explained very well with the calculated distributions of gas temperature and radiation on the plane of the final superheater.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.41-46
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• 2010

The low alloy-steel material(1.0Cr-0.5Mo, SA213T12), which has widely been used for the waterwall tube in the conventional power plant, do not have enough creep rupture strength for waterwall tubes of the Ultra-supercritical(USC) boilers. According to this reason, the high-strength low alloy-steel(2.25Cr-1.0Mo, SA213T22) has newly been adopted for the waterwall tube in the USC boilers. This paper presents failure analysis on weld-joint of the waterwall tubes in USC boilers. Visual inspections were performed to find out the characteristics of the fracture. Additionally both microscopic characteristics and hardness test were carried out on failed tube samples. Failures seem to happen mainly because the welding process has not been conducted strictly.(preheating, P.W.H.T and so forth). Thus, this paper has the purpose to describe the main cause of the poor welding process and to explain how to prevent similar failures in those weld-joints.

• Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.552-559
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• 2008

Three dimensional numerical analysis were performed to investigate the combustion characteristics in a tangentially fired pulverized coal boiler. The predicted values at the outlet of economizer for the gas temperature, O$_2$, NO, CO were been compared with the measured data. By using the actual operating conditions of the power plant, the distribution of velocity, gas temperature, O$_2$, CO, CO$_2$ and NO as well as the particle tracking in the boiler were investigated. Throughout the present study, the non-uniform distribution of flue gas temperature in front of the final superheater might be resulted from the residual swirl flow in the upper furnace of the boiler. The present analysis on non-uniform distribution of the gas temperature could provide the useful information to prevent the frequent tube failure from happening in the final superheater of the tangentially coal-fired boiler.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.179-187
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• 2002

Finite element analysis was performed to evaluate the integrity of the tubes in the fixed tubesheet of horizontal type heat exchanger under operating condition. For the finite element analysis of the heat exchanger, tubes and tubesheets were equivalently modeled with concentroidal hexagonal columns and solid plates having equivalent properties for the convenience of finite element modeling, respectively. Load combination of tube pressure and thermal expansion most likely to precipitate possible failure of the tubes was selected and applied to the finite element analysis. The compressive stresses of the tubes were calculated based on displacements of each tube, which were obtained from anile element analysis. Finally, the maximum tube stress was compared with the design criterion of ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code Section VIII.

• Proceedings of the KWS Conference
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• 2009.11a
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• pp.61-61
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• 2009

This paper has been performed in order to figure out the reason of failure in T23 weldments used for boiler tube at 550 $^{\circ}C$. Defects such as cracks and cavities occurred in CGHAZ (coarse grain heat-affected-zone) and multi pass of weld metal, and these crack propagated along grain boundary. Microstructure evolution such as grain growth and carbide precipitation was investigated by optical microscope (OM), transmission electron microscope(TEM). Moreover, Auger electron spectroscope (AES) was employed in order to examine segregation along the grain boundaries. There is significant difference in grain size and precipitation distribution in the region where cracking took place. In addition, sulfur segregation was observed. Based on the results of this investigation, it has been possible to establish that this type of cracks were consistent with reheat cracking and creep damage. Selection of optimal filler metal, heat input, and PWHT temperature is required for prevention in order to avoid this type of cracking.