Failure Cases Analysis in Petrochemical Industry

In recent years, the failure accidents in petrochemical industry have been frequent, and have posed great security problems in personnel and property. The improvement of petrochemical safety is highly requested in order to prevent re-occurrence of severe accident. This study focuses on surveying the failure cases occurred in petrochemical field, which were extracted from journals of engineering failure, including engineering failure analysis and case studies in engineering failure analysis. The relation of failure mode, failure mechanism, type of components, and type of materials was analyzed in this study. And the analytical results showed that failures occurred more frequently in vessels and piping among the petrochemical equipment. Moreover, equipment made of carbon steel and stainless steel accounts for the majority of failures compared to other materials. This may be related to the application of the equipment and the performance of the material. In addition, corrosion failures were the largest in number of occurrence in the failure of petrochemical equipment, in which stress corrosion cracking accounts for a large proportion. This may have a lot to do with the service environment of the petrochemical equipment. Therefore, it can be concluded that the corrosion prevention of petrochemical equipment is particularly important.

Effect of T6 and Re-Aging Heat Treatment on Mechanical Properties of 7055 Aluminum Alloy

Heat treatable aluminum alloys such as 7075 and 7055, because of high strength and low density, are used widely in aircraft industry. For best mechanical properties, T6 heat treatment has recommended for this regards, but this temper treatment is sensitive to corrosion induced and Stress Corrosion Cracking (SCC) damage. For improving this property, the over-aging treatment (T7) applies to this alloy, but it decreases the mechanical properties up to 30 percent. Hence, to increase the mechanical properties, without any remarkable decrease in SCC resistant, Retrogression and Re-Aging (RRA) heat treatment is used. This treatment performs in a relatively short time. In this paper, the RRA heat treatment was applied to 7055 aluminum alloy and then effect of RRA time on the mechanical properties of 7055 has been investigated. The results show that the 40-minute time is suitable time for retrogression of 7055 aluminum alloy and ultimate strength increases up to 625MPa.

Stress Corrosion Crack Identification with Direct Assessment Method in Pipeline Downstream from a Compressor Station

Stress Corrosion Crack (SCC) in pipeline is a type of environmentally assisted cracking (EAC), since its discovery in 1965 as a possible cause of failure in pipeline, SCC has caused, on average, one of two failures per year in the U.S, According to the NACE SCC DA a pipe line segment is considered susceptible to SCC if all of the following factors are met: The operating stress exceeds 60% of specified minimum yield strength (SMYS), the operating temperature exceeds 38°C, the segment is less than 32 km downstream from a compressor station, the age of the pipeline is greater than 10 years and the coating type is other than Fusion Bonded Epoxy(FBE). In this paper as a practical experience in NISOC, Direct Assessment (DA) Method is used for identification SCC defect in unpiggable pipeline located downstream of compressor station.

Fatigue Analysis of Crack Growing Rate and Stress Intensity Factor for Stress Corrosion Cracking in a Pipeline System

Environment-assisted cracking (EAC) is one of the most serious causes of structural failure over a broad range of industrial applications including offshore structures. In EAC condition there is not a definite relation such as Paris equation in Linear Elastic Fracture Mechanics (LEFM). According to studying and searching a lot what the researchers said either a material has contact with hydrogen or any other corrosive environment, phenomenon of electrical and chemical reactions of material with its environment will be happened. In the literature, there are many different works to consider fatigue crack growing and solve it but they are experimental works. Thus, in this paper, authors have an aim to evaluate mathematically the pervious works in LEFM. Obviously, if an environment is more sour and corrosive, the changes of stress intensity factor is more and the calculation of stress intensity factor is difficult. A mathematical relation to deal with the stress intensity factor during the diffusion of sour environment especially hydrogen in a marine pipeline is presented. By using this relation having and some experimental relation an analytical formulation will be presented which enables the fatigue crack growth and critical crack length under cyclic loading to be predicted. In addition, we can calculate KSCC and stress intensity factor in the pipeline caused by EAC.