News & Insights

The Becht Blog

In this section of the site contributing authors submit interesting articles relating
to the various services, industries and research & development efforts of Becht.

News & Blog

Mentoring Young Process Engineers

Today’s young process engineers have tools available to them that we “old timers” only dreamed about.  Although smaller and some medium sized companies will not have the items listed below, most large refining and or petrochemical operations have the following: Real-time and historical plant operating data available on his/her desk top computers; Real-time and historical […]

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Reduced Toughness Properties of Some Modern Carbon Steels Create Brittle Fracture Risk

Changes in steelmaking practice are reported to be causing some carbon steel piping components that are assumed by ASME Codes to behave in a ductile manner at ambient temperatures, to behave instead in a brittle manner.  Barry Messer from Fluor made a presentation on this subject at the Spring 2016 meeting of the ASME B31.3, […]

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Introduction to LOCA Blowdown Loads on Reactor Internals and Fluid-Structure Interaction

Design of a Nuclear Power Plant for a LOCA Nuclear power plants are designed with the capability to safely shut-down following a number of hypothetical accident scenarios. One of those accidents is the rupture of a pipe in the reactor coolant system (RCS). Such a rupture would result in a loss of coolant accident (LOCA), […]

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PSM Implementation is a Challenge — Maintaining Compliance is Even Harder

The Process Safety Management rule (PSM), OSHA 1910.119, was implemented in the early 90’s, more than 20 years ago. Implementation was driven by a number of tragic accidents in the process industry. However, despite the long history of the rule and multiple preventable, catastrophic incidents, many companies still have not fully implemented PSM. Companies that […]

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Expert Witness – A Becht Engineering Service to Avoid

Becht Engineering personnel have significant experience in serving as Expert Witnesses for a variety of legal matters.   However, litigation can be costly, time consuming and often times the outcome is unpredictable. It should be avoided if at all possible through implementation of proper controls and oversight. A much better strategy than after the fact litigation […]

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Becht Advisors Exceed Client Expectations

Gulf Coast Refinery Turnaround  Becht Engineering mobilized Advisors to Louisiana to supplement a Client’s operations organization during a 45-day, fourth quarter 2015 turnaround. The planned outage included cleaning the pyro-fractionator coke fines, replacing the internals of a 5-stage gas compressor, cleaning, inspecting and making tie-ins for a flare recovery system, complete re-traying of an ethylene […]

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Mitigating Turnaround Discovery Risk

Recently, a Becht Inspection Planner was preparing the Inspection Turnaround Plan for a client’s HF Alkylation Unit. When reviewing the unit’s equipment histories the Planner found documentation stating the Iso-Sidecut Receiver (14’X30’ @ 30ft elevation) had scattered hydrogen blisters on one elliptical head from the past two inspection reports. The inspection recommendations were to monitor […]

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Natural Gas Fuel – Is It Time To Convert?

Natural gas costs have decreased substantially relative to fuel oil over the past few years because of the major gas production increase due to fracking. This has led some fuel oil consumers to consider spending capital to allow a switch to natural gas. A Becht Engineering client, Coopers Creek Chemical, Inc., in Conshohocken, PA, requested […]

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Risk Based Work Selection – A Process Focusing On Turnaround Excellence

Risk Based Work Selection (RBWS) is one of the Best Practices used by refiners in managing safety and reliability of operations for a facility. RBWS enables refiners to optimize the scope, cost and duration of major turnarounds (TA). Optimization of the work scope is accomplished by screening individual TA Work List items, using a risk-based […]

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