Temperature Prediction Method for Superheater and Reheater Tubes of Fossil Power Plant Boiler During Operation

The superheater and reheater tubes of a heavy-load fossil power plant boiler can be damaged by overheating, and therefore, the degree of overheating is assessed by measuring the oxide scale thickness inside the tube during outages. The tube temperature prediction from the oxide scale thickness measurement is necessarily accompanied by destructive tube sampling, and the result of tube temperature prediction cannot be expected to be accurate unless the selection of the overheated point is precise and the initial-operation tube temperature has been obtained. In contrast, if the tube temperature is to be predicted analytically, considerable effort (to carry out the analysis of combustion, radiation, convection heat transfer, and turbulence fluid dynamics of the gas outside the tube) is required. In addition, in the case of analytical tube temperature prediction, load changes, variations in the fuel composition, and operation mode changes are hardly considered, thus impeding the continuous monitoring of the tube temperature. This paper proposes a method for the short-term prediction of tube temperature; the method involves the use of boiler operation information and flow-network-analysis-based tube heat flux. This method can help in high-temperature-damage monitoring when it is integrated with a practical tube-damage-assessment method such as the Larson-Miller Parameter.