Thickness Measurement of Condenser Tubes 1

[franklin55]

can anybody advice which NDT will be better for finding out the remaining thickness of A179 tubes of surface condenser?

Regards

Iqbal

 

[ash9144]

Eddy current

 

[vpl]

I'd also vote for eddy current, but then scratched my head

-- franklin, aren't you replacing the entire tube bundle? Given the situation you first described, trying to replace individual tubes makes no sense.

At best, given your February outage, doing eddy current would allow you to derate and limp along until you can replace the entire tube bundle.

Patricia Lougheed

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[unclesyd]

You will need to find someone well versed in the technique of "Remote Field Eddy Current", due to CS tubes

You might checkout for future reference this article that shows what's available for tube testing.

http://www.ndt.net/article/ecndt98/chemical/117/117.htm#4

 

[rmw]

Your choices are eddy current or pulling a tube sample and sending it to a lab for testing.

If for some reason you can't do either one of those, you could get a machinist to try to get you an inside mic reading of the tube ID. Problem is, unless you had good records of what they tubes originally were, there might have been enough variation in the original tubes to throw off your ID readings.

rmw

 

[franklin55]

VPL
We have decided to replace some of the tubes during Feb outage. The reason i s that the the new bundle delivery time s beyond February 2011.
Anyhow now we are adopting the same strategy of changing some tubes at bottom portion (the most vulnerable portion)and the remaining tubes will be replaced next year based eddy current results.