Whitepapers

With aging equipment and facilities, operators face increasing challenges in maintaining equipment reliability, integrity, and safety. One of the biggest hidden threats to your plant’s efficient and safe operation is deteriorating sampling equipment. However, refineries often operate sampling systems as separate entities within the plant. This leaves plants open to gaps and potential risks in their sampling program.

A properly design alarm management system will minimize production losses, safety incidents and environmental excursions. To do this effectively, the alarms need to be designed for the process and managed for continuous improvement. It is important to evaluate the alarms based on process upsets and verify the functionality of the alarms as they relate to the operation. It is the operator’s job to react to the alarm but the alarms need to be monitored and managed.

Corrosion under insulation (CUI) is one of the costliest problems in the petrochemical industry. It also presents a high degree of potential danger. CUI occurs when moisture mixed with contaminants infiltrates insulation, encouraging the development of corrosion cells on the steel underneath. This paper demonstrates how Sherwin-Williams Heat-Flex® High-Temp 1200 withstands temperature fluctuations, thermal shock and other upset conditions to protect against hidden CUI.

Radial inflow turbines (RIT), or turboexpanders, have become not only essential to the oil and gas industry, but also to specific applications in the realm of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Variable inlet guide vanes (vIGV) are RIT’s unique feature, rendering the turboexpander as a variable geometry turbomachine. In turn, this makes a turboexpander an effective solution for variable load and flexible LNG production.

A Crude-to-Chemicals complex arises through the selection of the best combination of technologies suites and basic engineering further to a multi-criteria analysis, including financial aspects and environmental considerations completing, part of the holistic view, taking into account the specificities and constraints of each project. Integrated solutions also embed the entire unit life cycle to support the customer throughout the plant life through technical assistance follow-up and associated services for CTC projects that involve high-performance technologies.

Oil & Gas operators need more agile and flexible organizations due to the volatile macroeconomic conditions, uncertain geopolitical situations, and ecological pressures they face. With advancements in digital technologies and innovation accelerators, the management of asset maintenance processes has evolved considerably. Read IDC’s perspective on how technology adoption in the industry is increasing efficiency, delivering cost savings, enhancing performance, and improving the protection of assets.

The petrochemical industry needs ethylene and propylene purity analysis. The precision and reliability of these measurements, as well as speed and cost reduction, are important to prevent potential process upsets and to assure optimum throughput. The faster a reliable purity measurement can be achieved, the greater the product to market. For this reason, any significant advance in ethylene purity analysis that promises to lower costs and increase speed without sacrificing accuracy can have a major impact on the profitability of ethylene and propylene production plants. This paper describes the use of Tunable Diode Laser Absorption Spectroscopy (TDLAS) for extractive measurements of moisture in the processes of ethylene and propylene production.

Unexpected emergencies happen but can be mitigated with proper maintenance planning. Proactive maintenance is vital for long-term profitability. Implications for delaying machine maintenance includes losses to production even pre-outage and postponing scheduled maintenance may result in a larger workload during an outage timeframe. With proper forward planning, costs can be reduced by up to 20%. Read more to see how.