Papers by Author: Bum Shin Kim

Abstract: The vehicle suspension system is directly influenced to ride and handling. Therefore, the major components of the vehicle suspension system should have enough fatigue strength during its lifetime to protect passenger from the traffic accident. Spring is one of the major suspension part of vehicle. Thus, in this paper, a fatigue design method for leaf spring was proposed. At first, numerical stress analysis for leaf spring assembly was performed. On the base of the analysis results, fatigue strength of leaf spring was assessed. And next, after studying numerically on geometrical parameters of leaf spring assembly, an economical prediction method of fatigue design criterion for leaf spring assembly using the theory of artificial neural network was developed and certified its usefulness. Without performing a lot of additional fatigue test for a long time, fatigue design criterion for a new leaf spring assembly having different geometry can be predicted on the base of the already obtained fatigue data.

Abstract: As a number of aged fossil power plants recently increased, the precise life assessment of critical equipments gets to be important more than ever. Despite of infrequent likelihood of failure, the equipments in high pressure and temperature operation condition have traditionally been considered as critical because of huge consequence of the equipments and hence life assessment of fossil power plant has been focused on all of the severe operated equipments for past decades. Nowadays, with Risk-Based Inspection technology being developed rapidly, most of the power plant utilities get a chance to reduce the scope of the inspection and test and to extend the interval for the life assessment. This paper provides methodology based on Risk-Based Inspection technology to optimize the life assessment work scope and interval and also demonstrates the enhanced life assessment procedure including risk assessment of equipments.

Abstract: The operation mode of thermal power plants has been changed from the base load to duty cycle. From the changeover, fossil power plants cannot avoid frequent thermal transient state, for example, start up and stop, which results in thermal fatigue damage at the heavy section components. The rotor is the highest capital cost component in steam turbine and requires long outage for replacing the new one. For optimized power plant operation life and inspection management of rotor is necessary. It is known as general that start-up and shutdown operation greatly affect on steam turbine life. The start-up operation condition is especially severe because of the rapid temperature and rotational speed increase, which causes damage and reduction of main components life of steam turbine. The start-up stress of rotor which is directly related life is composed of thermal and rotational stresses. The thermal stress is due to the variation of steam flow temperature and rotational stress is due to the rotation speed of itself. In this paper, the analysis method of start-up stress of rotor which considers simultaneously temperature and rotation speed transition is proposed, which includes a case study regarding 500MW fossil power plant steam turbine rotor. Also, the method of damage quantitative estimation of fatigue damage to operation condition is described. The method can be applied to find weak points to the fatigue damage. Using the method, total life consumption can be obtained, and can be also used for determining future operation mode and the life extension of old fossil power units.

Abstract: Acoustic emission (AE) technique was used to investigate fatigue crack growth on compact tension specimens of aging materials at room temperature. Test materials have been sampled steam pipe serviced the actual operation conditions for a long time in fossil power plant. The compact tension test specimens were subjected to load stress ratios of 0.33, 0.5, and 0.66. All the fatigue tests were performed at a frequency of 1Hz. The test results indicate that acoustic emission counts show reasonable correlation with crack propagation rates for applied stress ratios. When the crack growth rates increase, AE’s counts and energies show increment. Also, the higher stress ratios, the faster crack propagation rates. Based on these relationships it may be possible to predict the remaining service life of fatigue-damaged steam pipes.

Abstract: For prevention of failure and extension of maintenance interval, many Asian power companies have continuously tried to apply Condition Based Maintenance system to their plants. However, only few companies succeed to change their maintenance system from fixed time based to equipment condition based, although there are many brand new ITs, such as high speed computing system, huge storage device, and advanced development software tools. This paper describes the reasons why they failed to change and proposes the solutions to construct maintenance management system based on equipment condition. The solutions were also applied practically to power plant in Korea.

Abstract: In recent, ferritic stainless steels are widely used in high temperature structure because of their high resistance in thermal fatigue and low prices. Tensile and low cycle fatigue(LCF) tests on 429EM stainless steel were performed at several temperatures from room temperature to 600°C. Elastic modulus, yield stress and ultimate tensile strength(UTS) decreased with increasing temperature. Considerable cyclic hardening occurred at 200°C and 400°C. 475°C embrittlement observed could not explain this phenomenon but dynamic strain aging(DSA) observed from 200°C to 500°C could explain the hardening mechanism at 200°C and 400°C. And it was observed that plastic strain energy density(PSED) was useful to predict fatigue life when large cyclic hardening occurred. Fatigue life using PSED over elastic modulus could be well predicted within 2X scatter band at various temperatures.