摘要

The paper briefs the current trends of the construction of high temperature plants. The need of higher efficiency and lower consumption of resources has led to higher operation parameters of the plants. It is thus believed that the safety of high temperature installations is a critical issue that could hardly be circumvented in the period of post-industrial civilization. In order to achieve a reliable design and manufacture and safe operation of the high temperature plants, some fundamental issues concerning life prediction and failure assessment should be studied. Being aware of some very slow chemical reactions occurred in the high temperature materials after a certain period of service time, it is suggested that the physico-chemical kinetics of the high temperature materials during the slow creep process should be established so that the inaccuracy of life extrapolation techniques based on the conventional Arrhenius equation could be avoided. As the actual material in a component is generally subjected to a complex stress state and the machining of a standard fracture specimen from the component is normally not possible, high temperature fracture theory under constraints should be developed to allow the estimation of fracture properties of the material. Furthermore, a unified failure assessment diagram that includes the local fracture property, the limit loading capacity and the damage law is proposed in order to assess the structural safety under complex loading and environment cases.