Design of thick-walled components for power plants from crack-growth models

摘要

In a method and a computer program product for designing a component for an industrial plant, in particular a thick-walled component for a power plant, by means of an iteration, in which the steps ofcomputing a plurality of process variables by means of a process simulator;modelling growth of at least one hypothetical crack in the component, based on a structure of the component and the process variables;computing a life expectancy for the component by determining a time required for a dimension of the hypothetical crack to exceed a given critical limit;modifying the structure of the component; are repeated until the time required for the crack dimension to exceed the given critical limit fulfils a pre-determined requirement, a time dependent load-profile and a dynamic process simulator capable of modelling transient process behaviour is used to compute the process variables.