Design and Development of Platform Deployment Arm (PDA) for Boiler Header Inspection at Thermal Power Plant by Using the House of Quality (HOQ) Approach

Abstract

Power plant inspection is a regular activity for repair and maintenance purposes. Boiler headers serve as to tie multiple steam mains to one boiler or multiple boilers to one or more steam mains. The challenge to do inspection inside boiler headers is they come with different configuration of inspection entry. A special 'Platform Deployment Arm' (PDA) is built to latch the inspection robot inside the boiler header. A House of Quality (HOQ) approach is applied the design the PDA in order to construct the relationship between engineering or technical aspects with the customer requirements. Those requirements displayed in the form of matrix before translating it into the final design. All the designs and development selection process of PDA based on HOQ are shown in this study. Several lab tests were done to validate the workability of the PDA. © 2017 The Authors.