Maintenance & Reliability
Refinery revamp opportunities with welded plate heat exchangers
The plate-and-shell (P&S) heat exchanger has three significant advantages over the shell-and-tube (S&T) type traditionally used in refinery processes.
Fatigue damage assessment of coke drums based on temperature monitoring
Coke drums are expensive equipment with a long manufacturing cycle, so a realistic and accurate life prediction can save significant time and money.
Asset life assessment: A strategic reliability tool for the process industries
Asset life assessment (ALA) has become a strategic tool for process plants (e.g., petrochemical, chemical, and oil and gas) to determine the extent of degradation and the ability of assets to bear static and dynamic loads while sustaining the desired production processes.
Best options for a reboiler revamp
It is always a challenge to reconfigure and resize existing reboilers, especially vertical thermosiphon ones, for the revised design and operating conditions of a brownfield project, since hydraulics external to the reboiler must match the reboiler hydraulics under the revamped conditions to ensure trouble-free operation.
Benefits of close-coupled flush rings
The chemical industry uses flush rings for diaphragm seals.
Address measurement uncertainty in pipelines and storage
How would you measure the volume of a can of soup? The height should work, but what about diameter? Or, you can possibly just trust what the manufacturer has told you on the label.
Analyze machinery failure data with a spreadsheet
Some basic, yet insightful, machinery reliability tracking tools are introduced here that can be developed with common spreadsheet applications, such as Excel.
Pumps handicapped by not using best available technology
Pump lubrication deficiencies are often denied, and the outstanding reliability performance of oil mist is vastly underreported.
Editorial Comment: Embracing uncertainty for a better tomorrow
The downstream processing industry is changing.
Measure and predict torsional vibration in rotating equipment
Excessive torsional vibration in rotating equipment trains can result in damage to, or failure of, equipment, leading to emergency shutdowns and costly downtime.
- Serbia secures U.S. sanctions waiver for its NIS oil firm 3/20
- Tanker carrying fuel originally bound for Cuba diverts to Trinidad 3/20
- Vietnam accelerates shift to ethanol fuel as Iran war drives up energy prices 3/20
- Damaged Russian tanker days away from Libyan shores, Italian official says 3/20
- India’s Reliance buys about 155,000 bpd Russian oil after pause 3/20
- China's Sinochem cuts refinery runs, seeks prompt-delivery crude 3/20
