Finite Element Modelling of Creep for an Industrial Application

Abstract

Thermal power stations operate at elevated temperatures and pressures in order to attain maximum available steam energy. At these high temperatures creep becomes a dominant mechanism that needs to be considered. However, for many components, the locations where peak stresses occur are unreachable to apply the commonly used Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) techniques. This encourages the use of Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to better predict the creep state in these complex components.

Commonly, creep damage models are used in conjunction with accelerated creep tests to develop material models that can be implemented into a FEA to determine failure. These approaches are often infeasible for industrial decision-making, leaving a gap for more accessible commercially available models to be developed. This paper focuses on using openly available creep data from the Japanese National Institute for Material Science (NIMS). A creep strain model capable of modelling only the primary and secondary creep regimes was then chosen from the ANSYS database to fit this data. In order to fully characterise the experimental data a multi-creep-model approach was adopted that uses a family of creep models, instead of a single creep material model, to characterise the probable range of responses. This methodology was applied to an industrial application, namely an Intermediate Pressure (IP) valve operating under creep-prone conditions. The multi-creep-model approach was incorporated into FEA to analyse the variation in stress distributions. It was interesting to see that a variation of 153% in the creep strain models only resulted in a 21% variation in the relaxed stress. Worst case scenario life time calculations were then conducted using both a time-based Larson-Miller approach and a strain-based ASME code approach. Both sets of results showed that, for the specific component of interest, creep rupture lifetimes were in excess of 3000 years. It was therefore noted that, for the IP valve of interest, the operating temperature and pressure combination were such that no worrisome creep damage occurred. In conclusion, for the specific component analysed, the operating conditions are such that creep based failure will not occur.