Potential drop monitoring of creep damage at a weld

Abstract

Creep failure at welds will often be the life limiting factor for pressurised power station components, offering a site for local damage accumulation. Monitoring the creep state of welds will be of great value to power station management and potential drop monitoring may provide a useful tool. This paper provides a preliminary study of potential drop monitoring of creep damage at a weldment, suggesting a measurement arrangement for a previously documented quasi-DC technique that is well suited to the application. The industrial context of the problem of creep damage at a weldment is explored, together with a numerical simulation of the effect of cracking, finally, a cross-weld accelerated creep test demonstrating the promise of the technique is presented.