Damage assessment of attemperator of thermal power plant boilers

Due to rapid growth and development and the demand for power, has pushed steam plant design into new territories of temperature and thermal cycling. Coupled with this has been the tendency for plant suppliers to buy rather than design critical items of equipment in the hope of minimising exposure to the consequences of malfunction however, this has seen an upsurge of trouble in several areas –particularly with attemperator. Although simple in concept, attemperator can cause serious problems if details of their design are not properly considered, and/or if they are not properly applied to the systems they are to serve.

This paper presents by using optical fiber based video imaging technique to identify the affected regions in the attemperator which causes the malfunctioning of the boiler which may resulting catastrophical failure and damaging its components. This will result in reduced frequency of forced outages of the plant which in turn lead to substantial savings to the utility.