SR1
Life Time Monitoring System
Lifetime Monitoring of Thick-Walled Components
SR1 is a program system certified by an officially approved testing agency (the German TÜV) for the continuous monitoring of the stress of thick-walled components of power station boilers and turbines based on the procedure described in the German Technical Specifications for Steam Boilers (TRD) and DIN EN 12952-4.
Why Implement a Lifetime Monitoring System?
Components in power plants subjected to high temperature and pressure degrade due to either material creep caused by temperature and pressure-induced stress or fatigue resulting from changing temperature gradients in the component wall.
Creep intensifies with higher temperatures and decreases with thicker walls, while fatigue linked to temperature-induced stress is more pronounced in thicker walls. During component design, a balance between these stresses is essential, aligning with relevant design rules.
As plant operation often deviates from initial design conditions, material degradation doesn't linearly correlate with operating time. Regular monitoring of plant operation is advisable, and an efficient approach is to employ a continuous data management and evaluation system.
Experience SR1's Dynamic Features
Determination of creep damage and low cycle fatigue
Real-time monitoring of high-stress component operations
Definition of a reasonable amount of inspection & identification of critical modes of operation by component ranking
Classification of operating pressure and temperature
Online calculation of wall differential temperature for determining stress from load cycling
Implementation without additional sensors
SR1's Application
Higher Flexibilization of the Unit Operation
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Plants with highly stressed, pressurized components like pipes, headers and other hollow parts as they are typically found in steam generators in power plants
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Determination of the component lifetime consumption from the past in older plants in order to gain reserves and thus potentials for extending the operating time. This will also work if no SR1 lifetime monitoring or IT-based storage of data has been carried out so far
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Backwards extrapolation from the beginning of the online monitoring. A reliable assessment of the history is possible already after online monitoring of ca. 5,000 hours of operation
Customer Benefits
SR1 Designed for Your Operations
SR1 continuous life time monitoring provides operators, authorized inspection agencies, and competent officials an important basis for assessment so that they can establish or extend the time intervals for required periodic inspections. Continuous life time monitoring makes it possible to choose the components that are subject to the highest stress for special attention during these inspections, making the inspections more precise and effective.
Start-up times can be reduced by selectively using existing off-loads, which SR1 can optimally identify. The power plant will be back on the network more quickly.