Engineering & Design

Improve refinery production and efficiency with asset monitoring

The sheer volume of equipment in a refinery—from vessels, columns, huge structures and mazes of pipes to pumps, valves, controllers and instruments—is staggering.

Onsite

Jenny Hebert and George Yaluris of Albemarle accept the <i>HP</i> Award for Best Catalyst Technology.

Engineering Case Histories: Case 103—Addressing heat exchanger tube leaks

Heat exchangers have multiple tubes with fluid passing through and over them that either heats or cools another fluid.

More residue processing in FCCUs

Resid units have more than 2 wt% Conradson carbon residue (Concarbon) in feed and more than 5,000 parts per million (ppm) of nickel (Ni) and vanadium (V) on equilibrium catalysts (Ecat).

Understand the installation of steam tracing for long-term application success—Part 2

One of the most misunderstood and misused components of conductive steam tracing systems is heat transfer compound (HTC).

Amine pumps upgraded for improved operations and reliability

A gas processing plant in Malaysia eliminated a source of expensive failures in its acid gas removal unit (AGRU).

Integrating fire and gas safety with process control systems: Why, what and how

If a fire, smoke or gas leak is detected in a hydrocarbon processing facility, prescriptive actions must be taken by the fire and gas (F&G) safety system, as well as by the process control system (PCS), to mitigate and control the hazard.

Built-up backpressure at the outlet flange of a pressure relief valve

Even for pressure relief valves (PRVs) discharging directly to the atmosphere through short tailpipes, API 520 Part 11 warns that choked flow may develop at the outlet flange, resulting in high backpressure.

Innovations

Reliability: How application engineers add value

Making the vendor-manufacturer your technology provider has been our consistent advice to the user industries; we have recommended this highly effective approach for many decades.