LCA ( see Life-Cycle Assessment)

LNG ( see Liquid Natural Gas)

Laser Cutting, Drilling, Machining, Welding ( see Metallurgy)

Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) (of Turbomachinery) ^[*]

Life-cycle assessment is the art of being able to use data about:

1. A machine, its operating history, and any failures

2. The fleet of that type and model of machine

3. Changing process conditions in a plant to assess or extend the life of turbomachinery components or the machine itself.

The data can be used to:

1. Avoid catastrophic failures

2. Improve the quality of the machine's operation (lower operational temperature, promoting less hot erosion)

3. Assess better the life cycles being accumulated on a machine to avoid premature overhauls or parts change

4. A combination of all of these

Many consulting companies today sell life-assessment services. Some of them provide a package that includes monitors, interpreting the data for their clients and so forth. Even if clients decide to pay for this service, they should get some basic training for in-house staff, so they can better assess their options. Also, any consulting service could be an interim measure if staff training is provided, so the clients can eventually proceed on their own.

For accurate life-cycle assessment, it is essential that the individual machine's parameters be used. Even among machines of exactly the same type and model, stress levels may be considerably different in actual operation.

Consider the following severe example. In a squadron of aircraft doing acrobatic maneuvers in formation for an air show, the squadron...