Smart Inspection & Monitoring - SIM
SIM is an innovative, digital overall concept for determining service life and inspection intervals for plant components, consisting of damage tolerance methodology, engineering services, online monitoring and approval aspects:
- Holistic inspection concept incl. simulation program, crack propagation tool, etc.
- Derivation of flexible inspection intervals
- Specifications for non-destructive testing - NDT (potential crack locations, position and orientation of possible cracks)
- Online monitoring as a basis for damage prevention as well as for extended analysis of plant, machine and process data
Advantages and economic benefits at a glance:
- Safeguarding of investment: exploitation of unused service life potential for system components (no premature component replacement).
- The inspection interval of the component can be adapted to the overall system and necessary downtimes can be shortened
- The continuous use of SIM can also reduce the number of unplanned shutdowns and downtimes. SIM also helps here to make maintenance costs more controllable
In addition, SIM makes a contribution to digitalization and planning reliability in maintenance. Permissible inspection intervals can be calculated online and forecasts can be made depending on the system operation.
Service life evaluation of components
With "Smart Inspection & Monitoring", DMT offers a solution with which the stability of components in the face of damage can be calculated more precisely while maintaining the same level of safety. This means that their operating times can be optimized economically.
The focus is on complex plants and components with long delivery times and/or high procurement costs in the power generation, chemical and process industries.
The concept is suitable for plant operators, inspectors and component manufacturers who deal with the challenges of components subject to alternating loads. Likewise, the concept is applicable to many energy sectors and industries with similar process parameters:
- Solar thermal power plants
- Fuel cells
- Heat pumps / heat exchangers
- Adiabatic compressed air storage
- Thermal accumulators
- Plant components in the chemical & pharmaceutical industry
- Pressure equipment requiring monitoring (steam boilers, pressure vessels, pipelines)
- Work equipment subject to pressure and temperature (pumps, compressors, furnaces, cokers, pipelines, fittings, ...)
Current regulations for SIM
As an important part of Smart Inspection & Monitoring, fracture mechanics damage tolerance analysis has already been incorporated into relevant regulations as a recognized measure for integrity assessment and test interval determination as well as a building block for condition monitoring, e.g. of thermally stressed boiler plants (including DIN EN 13445-3, VGB standard 506-00-2019-02-DE, VdTÜV bulletin MBDAMP 468 with recommendations for action for operators, ZÜS and plant manufacturers).
