Jamshedpur : The inaugural function of the national level workshop on Remaining Life Assessment (RLA -2014) was held at CSIR-National Metallurgical Laboratory, Jamshedpur this morning. This was the third in the series, organized by CSIR-NML. The earlier two workshops were conducted in 2003 and 2006 which caught attention from different industrial sectors most significantly from the power and petroleum sectors.
Chief guest and director, CSIR-NML, S. Srikanth while delivering his address said,” Remaining life assessment (RLA) of aged components in petrochemical industries / power plants warrant necessary safety measures. In India, there is a great demand for RLA since out of the total 1, 00, 000 MW capacity is over 25 years old.
Similarly in petrochemical industry, there are considerable numbers of reactors, pressure vessels, FPU columns, reformer furnaces which have rendered a prolonged life and there is a need for RLA studies from safety point of view.”
Steel Chair Professor, Dr. R.N. Ghosh from IIT Kharagpur in his keynote address said, “RLA has broad purpose that includes evaluation of parts to determine the degree of ageing and life extension beyond the design life, preventive maintenance to avoid costly forced outage, improvement in the construction of components through material substitution and shaped alternation and development of online diagnosis system to monitor the ageing.”
Dr. Ashok Kumar Ray, Chief Scientist, CSIR-NML and Co-ordinator RLA-2014, welcomed the gathering and mentioned that a large number of plant engineers, consultants, R&D material scientists and authorities dealing with regulations are participating in the seminar Notable participating industries are- Thermax Ltd., Pune; Sasan Power Ltd.; TATA Power; MRPL, Mangalore; BPCL, Mumbai; Mailam India Ltd., Pondichery; CPRI, Nagpur; Heavy Metal, Gujarat; Essar Steel, Gujarat; Bharat Forge, Pune; NTPC, Noida; TATA Steel; Electrical Research & Development Association, Gujarat; HAL, Koraput; and Kalyani Carpenter Special Steel Ltd.
The workshop will continue till tomorrow evening and will have practical demonstrations on the Use of various Non-destructive evaluation techniques (NDE); creep rapture tests; and NML MAT db (Metallurgical database) as a tool for RLA studies.
The participants raised several issues regarding various problems faced by them in their plant site and looked for solutions which were attended by Prof. Ghosh and other experts. Dr. Nilima Roy, Convener, RLA-2014 proposed the vote of thanks.
