Probability of Failure of Thermal Power Plant Boiler Tubing System Due to Corrosion

Corrosion is irreversible process of material degradation. Due to detrimental effects exerted on the operating material characteristics, especially in the boiler tube system, it is of one the most important issues in the operation of thermal plants and is considered to be the root cause of many outages. Besides common remaining life assessment methods, it is useful to apply a method of reliability evaluation of the thermal power plant boiler tubes with corrosion damages. Correlation of results obtained by these two methods makes possible to obtain a better knowledge of current tubes material state as well as a more accurate assessment of their behavior during future exploitation. Therefore, an integrated approach of remaining life assessment and reliability evaluation, on the first stage reheater tubes system example, is presented in this paper. Considerations of this kind are very important for the risk-based maintenance programs.