Environment & Safety Gas Processing/LNG Maintenance & Reliability Petrochemicals Process Control Process Optimization Project Management Refining

Maintenance & Reliability

HP Engineering Case Histories: Case 83: What are useful questions to ask before starting a vibration analysis?

Consulting Engineer: Sofronas, A.

Periodically, this author receives questions from readers throughout the world addressing what performance issues could be wrong with a centrifugal compressor that is vibrating. Note: It is impossible..

HP Innovations

Hydrocarbon Processing Staff: Blume, Adrienne

Corrosion prevention for high-TAN refiningFor petroleum refiners, improving profitability by processing high-total-acid-number (high-TAN) crude oils requires an investment in high-temperature corrosio..

HP Reliability: Does Pareto’s 80/20 rule apply to reliability engineers?

Hydrocarbon Processing Staff: Bloch, Heinz P.

In the 1970s, an oil refinery discovered that 7% of its 3,200 process pumps experienced a disproportionate share of the facility’s yearly pump outage events. Slightly over 60% of the money spent ..

Sulzer acquires weld overlay company Interweld

The integration will start after closing, which is expected in the beginning of 2015. All employees will be retained, ensuring ongoing customer dedication in the weld overlay marketplace.

Optimize amine sweetening with an optical O2 analyzer

Barben Analytical: Hammond, S.

After extraction, raw natural gas must go through processing before it is suitable for industrial, commercial and residential usage. The first stage of gas processing is known as “sweetening,&#14..

Fine-tune monitoring of critical compressors

PROGNOST Systems GmbH: Loeken, J.

In this case history, a new monitoring system was installed on a critical service hyper compressor for a Middle East (ME) ethylene complex. This unit supported two 400 Mton polyethylene (PE) units; do..

Consider technology to reduce compressor vibration and noise problems

Dresser-Rand: Liu, Z.

Industrial centrifugal compressors installed in hydrocarbon processing industry (HPI) complexes absorb significant amounts of mechanical power when compressing gases. A small part of the mechanical en..

Achieve successful compressor startup by addressing dry-gas seal failure

Toyo Engineering Canada Ltd.: Zardynezhad, S.

A common root cause for compressor failure during first startup is a failure of the dry-gas seal (DGS) system. To avoid failures of gas compressors, the project team and end users must understand the importance and significance of the DGS very early in the basic design phase.

Without reliability, there can be no safety

Oil Industry Safety Directorate: Dutta, H.

Reliability and safety are complimentary concepts. For instance, unless process reliability at a plant is extraordinary, safety cannot be assured. Achieving the highest level of safety at a processing..

HP Reliability: Plan now to deal with stressed equipment later

Hydrocarbon Processing Staff: Bloch, Heinz P.

The US Energy Information Administration’s (EIA’s) “Today in Energy” brief evaluated how US refineries are processing record amounts of crude oil (Fig. 1), with Midwest and Gulf Co..