Tat-Hean Gan

By Anurag Dhutti and Tat-Hean Gan

This chapter presents technological innovations that support asset integrity management—a crucial activity for optimising plant efficiency. In ageing thermal and geothermal power plants, critical assets such as steam piping are subject to high pressures and temperatures that accelerate damage mechanisms. Traditionally, the critical locations of these assets undergo routine inspection which is both costly and time consuming and affects the plant reliability and energy availability. There is an increasing trend in the application of non-destructive testing (NDT) and information technologies to in-service monitoring of these assets. The aim of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art monitoring technologies for steamlines, with a focus on high temperature ultrasonic guided wave techniques. The enabling technologies, which include high temperature sensors, diagnostic data analysis algorithms and their monitoring performances, are reviewed. These technological advancements enable inspection without interruption of plant operations, and provide diagnosis and prognosis data for condition-based maintenance, increasing plant safety and its operational efficiency.

Part of the book: Power Plants in the Industry

By Anurag Dhutti, Shehan Lowe and Tat-Hean Gan

This chapter presents advancements in structural health monitoring (SHM) using ultrasonic guided waves (UGW) technology for metallic structures to support their integrity and maintenance management. The focus is on pipelines and storage tanks, which are critical assets in the Oil and Gas industry, whose operational conditions can greatly accelerate damage mechanisms. Conventional routine inspections are both costly and time consuming and affect the plant reliability and availability. These operational and economic disadvantages have led to development of SHM systems which can be permanently installed on these critical structures to provide information about developing damage and optimise maintenance planning and ensure structural integrity. These technology advancements enable inspection without interruption to operations, and generate diagnosis and prognosis data for condition-based maintenance, hence increasing safety and operational efficiency. The fundamentals, architecture and development of such SHM systems for pipes and above ground storage tanks are described here.

Part of the book: Advances in Structural Health Monitoring

By Bojie Sheng, Jamil Kanfoud and Tat-Hean Gan

Metal Additive Manufacturing (AM) is an emerging technology for rapid prototype manufacturing, and the structural integrity of printed structures is extremely important and should meet the specifications and high standards of the above industries. In several metal AM techniques, residual stresses and micro-cracks that occur during the manufacturing procedure can result in irreversible damage and structural failure of the object after its manufacturing. Thus effective quality control of AM is highly required. Most Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) techniques (X-Ray, Computed Tomography, Thermography) are ineffective in detecting residual stresses. Bulk, cost, and resolution are limitations of such technologies. These methods are time consuming both for data acquisition and data analysis and have not yet been successfully integrated into AM technology. However two sets of NDT techniques: Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducers (EMAT) and Eddy Current (EC) Testing, can be applied for residual stress detection for AM techniques. Therefore a crucial and novel extension system incorporation of big data collection from sensors of the both techniques and analysis through machine learning (ML) can estimate the likelihood of the AM techniques to introduce anomalies into the printed structures, which can be used as an on-line monitoring and detection system to control the quality of AM.

Part of the book: Advanced Additive Manufacturing