Emerson’s Kevin Thomas discussed corrosion and erosion monitoring at the 4C Health, Safety & Environmental conference. Kevin opened citing some statistics. 100 of the most expensive downstream accidents cost $50 million in damage.
Chemical and electrochemical reactions create metal loss in piping and vessels in an industrial process. Manual inspection is typically performed infrequently and miss conditions that may lead to accidents. Chemical inhibitors are another tactic to neutralize the corrosive fluids. Yet still manual inspections are typically performed.
Variable corrosion with unknown impact leading to major incidents. Variability comes from feedstock differences, changes in process conditions and fluids, longer runs between scheduled outages, tighter health & safety regulations, tighter capital budgets, and a shortage of experienced personnel.
Corrosion and erosion are monitored with many technologies. Coupons provide periodic data. Inline probes and acoustic sand monitors monitor for risk and infer metal losses. Wireless non-intrusive ultrasonic thickness (UT) transmitters perform single point wall thickness integrity measurements, showing actual metal thickness and loss.
With the wireless monitoring, root cause analysis and predictive maintenance can be instituted predicting when the piping will reach minimum thickness and need to be replaced.
Emerson offers corrosion and erosion services both on-site and remote. With Connected Services, periodic reports can be provided with the changes seen and recommendations on what actions need to be planned for the next opportunity to address the issues.
The sensors can be connected in many ways from magnetic connection to pipe with strap backup to mounted on high temperature pipes on a welded stand.
Kevin shared an ROI measured in months for a typical refinery with 500 wireless sensors. These come in maintenance savings, downtime avoidance, and higher sustained production with less variability, and shorter turnarounds.
Visit the Corrosion & Erosion Monitoring section on Emerson.com for more on these technologies and solutions to improve health, safety and environmental performance.
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