High temperature ultrasonic measurements of plant and components for defect detection and monitoring

Completed

Nuclear Fission and Fusion(Nuclear Fission, Nuclear supporting technologies)
Not Energy Related
Other Power and Storage Technologies(Electric power conversion)

Basic and strategic applied research

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (Mechanical, Aeronautical and Manufacturing Engineering)

Not Cross-cutting

Professor KJ Kirk
School of Engineering and Science
University of the West of Scotland

Standard

EPSRC

28 September 2009

27 March 2012

30 months

£171,233

Mechanical engineering

Scotland

Manufacturing: Engineering

Professor KJ Kirk, School of Engineering and Science, University of the West of Scotland

Professor F Placido, School of Engineering and Science, University of the West of Scotland

Project Contact, Sheffield Forgemasters Engineering Ltd (SFEL)
Project Contact, Tenaris S.A. (Luxembourg)
Project Contact, BP Refining Technology
Project Contact, RWE Generation

Linked to grant EP/G042284/1

There are many instances where components and plant operate at elevated temperatures such as turbines, high temperature processing pipework, power generation boilers and reactors. Currently, most non-destructive testing (NDT) is carried out at lower or ambient temperature, necessitating at least partial shut-down of the process. Planned outage of plant is costly but the cost of unplanned outage due to catastrophic failure can run to millions of pounds, and can have extremely serious consequences for the safety of personnel and the public. In addition, some plant contains areas that are extremely difficult to access even during an outage meaning that the only viable approach is to use permanently installed monitoring.We propose devices and concepts to enable high temperature monitoring and inspection where it is currently impossible. This is stimulated not only by the industrial imperative, but also by major advances in knowledge and understanding of high temperature piezoelectric materials, in thick film and thin film form, operating at temperatures up to 800C. The attraction in developing high temperature sensors from these materials is that they can be robust, inexpensive andpermanently installed on plant. In a novel "hybrid system" concept, not previously applied to high temperature inspection, we will combine these with improved non-contact ultrasonic generation techniques

20/04/09