High-temperature boiler tubes in
superheaters and reheaters are subject to creep damage — microstructural
degradation that progresses invisibly at operating temperature and produces
catastrophic tube failure without external indication. Replication metallography
and specialist UT techniques are required for creep damage assessment, and the
short access windows in boiler outages demand rapid, systematic deployment.
Power station condensers and
feedwater heaters contain thousands of tubes operating in corrosive cooling
water environments. Tube failure from pitting, erosion, SCC, and FAC
(flow-accelerated corrosion) is a leading cause of forced outage in thermal
power stations. Full-bundle inspection during outage windows requires
high-speed tube inspection techniques that can assess the entire tube
population within the available time.
Steam turbine casings, rotors, and
blading are subject to fatigue cracking, stress corrosion, and erosion from
steam quality excursions. Access for inspection is constrained by the
mechanical complexity of the disassembly required to reach inspection surfaces
— making automated scanning and robotic NDT particularly valuable in turbine
inspection programmes.
Power station outage windows are
driven by commercial generation revenue loss — every additional day of outage
has a direct monetary cost. Inspection methods and deployment approaches that
compress the inspection timeline without compromising coverage or probability
of detection are not a luxury in power generation — they are an operational
requirement.
Phased array UT and TOFD for
boiler drum welds, pressure vessel welds, and steam piping — delivering rapid,
full-coverage weld inspection with superior defect characterisation within the
compressed outage windows that power generation requires.
Multi-technique tube inspection
deployed to the tube material: ECT for non-ferrous condenser and feedwater
heater tubes, RFET and MFL for carbon steel boiler and heat recovery tubes, and
IRIS for direct wall thickness measurement confirmation on critical bundles.
UAV external inspection of cooling
towers, chimney stacks, and elevated boiler structures — and collision-tolerant
internal drone survey of boiler drums, ducts, and confined process spaces —
reducing inspection window duration by eliminating scaffold erection and
confined space entry preparation time.
In-service UT thickness
measurement on boiler pressure parts, steam drum shells, and process piping at
operating temperature — enabling corrosion rate monitoring between planned
outages without shutdown.
Multi-axis robotic UT scanning for turbine casing inspection, pressure vessel head inspection, and nozzle weld examination — delivering programmed, full-coverage scanning with coverage verification on complex geometries that manual scanning cannot reliably achieve.