Posted by Mike White on January 28, 2000 at 14:17:05:
I am a boiler inspector in the UK and am doing a thesis on the failure of boilers furnace to tubeplate attachement welds. The subject is interesting and I have on my basic website a photo of a recently found defect. The defect is about 3/4 of the way through the furnace tube. Luckily the defect was found before catastophic failure.
I am after information concerning the design of the tubeplate and the calculation of stresses in the joint. It is undoubtably the cyclic stress combined with weld undercut that is the major contributor to failure, another is sometimes the presence of scale. In the UK we check the welds every 5 years with UT.