A method has been developed for predicting a remaining operational life of
a turbine component including: obtaining crack flaw data regarding
current crack flaws in the turbine component; using the crack flaw data
with data regarding the structure and operating conditions of the turbine
component to determine force loads applied to the turbine component and
generate crack propagation data; applying a probalistic analysis to the
crack flaw data and the generated crack propagation data to generate a
statistical distribution of crack data, and applying the statistical
distribution of crack data to predict a time to failure of the component
by iteratively determining the force loads for successive periods of
time.