In 2008, Becht Engineering was awarded a project by the Materials Technology Institute (MTI) to develop an inspection guideline document and software tool for the collection and analysis of inspection data for piping, piping components and pressure vessels. Dr. Eileen Chant , as project manager, collaborated with Bob Sims of Becht, Dr. Mark Stone of […]
Participants: Gerrit Buchheim, Mel Larson, Fred Lea, and Robert Ohmes To review the Q&A article in Digital Refining, please click HERE We didn’t expect severe corrosion issues in the carbon steel of our amine unit. What’s causing it? – Gerrit Buchheim Severe corrosion in amine units is not rare and should be expected. Depending […]
Bringing Order and Logic to the Evaluation Process There is a multitude of documents and reports that describe the damage mechanisms of ASME pressure equipment (vessels, pumps, valves, piping, and tanks, and their supports) in nuclear power plants. Thousands of pages published by EPRI, the NRC, ASME, NACE, research laboratories, utilities, contractors, and others, to […]
In the past ten years, there have been a few oil storage tank annular plate failures due to soil side corrosion and fatigue loading (filling and emptying) which has led to large spills. The corrosion tends to be localized in a groove fashion and the size of the flaw could vary from 3 feet to […]
Reducing Loss of Primary Containment (LOPC’s) or commonly referred to as “leaks” in a refinery is a key factor to improve reliability. Historically, most refiners reduced the high consequence leaks to avoid major incidents; however, lower consequence related leaks were not given high priority. Today high reliability is required, and reduction of all leaks is […]
On May 18, 2017, the California Department of Industrial Relations’ Occupational Safety and Health Standards (CalOSHA) board approved a new regulation that changes how Process Safety Management (PSM) is handled for oil refineries within the state of California. This regulation was approved in response to high-profile industry incidents in the state of California in the […]
The evaluation of wall thinning corrosion in steel pipes is addressed in three ASME XI code cases: N-513, N-597, and N-806. I have no ambition here other than to summarize in a table the differences between these three code cases. A brief commentary follows the table. The brief commentary… Line A – While these are […]
There are many reasons why a refinery may want to change their crude slates. However, all of them boil down to economics. Whether a cheaper crude is available or there is a desire to manufacture specific products to increase profitability – money is the driver. However, in deciding to change your crude slate, the long […]
This article outlines the procedure to evaluate the fitness-for-service of corroded buried pipe, and explains what CC N-806 covers … and what it does not cover. What are the Damage Mechanisms in Metallic Buried Pipe? The inspection of a buried metallic pipe, after years of service, can reveal that the pipe has little if any […]
There are numerous challenges that Inspectors and Reliability Engineers face when developing Risk Based Asset Integrity Plans, such as: Identifying the applicable Damage Mechanisms Picking the correct Failure Mode(s) Determining the Probability of Failure Deciding how to mitigate risks to acceptable levels Industry documents give some guidance (i.e. API-571, API-580) but not the whole picture. […]
