Refinery operators face increasingly complex challenges in managing integrity of process units and assets – driven by the goal to achieve operational excellence and maximize asset performance while minimizing costs and maintaining the highest safety and environmental standards. Such challenges stem from multiple operational factors, including changing process feed, need to work with more complex process dynamics and difficulties associated with correlating potential corrosion damage to process parameters across different units. A more challenging aspect is the need to correlate and rationalize all of the data and corrosion touch points to ensure and enhance mechanical integrity.
Industry Recommended Practices, such as API RP 970 - Corrosion Control Documents (CCD) and API RP 584 - Integrity Operating Windows (IOW) provide a best practices framework to define principal integrity and degradation concerns, correlate multiple unit operational parameters such feed rate, composition, process parameters, damage mechanisms, metallurgy etc. Such a framework is designed to give the refinery operators the ability to identify the key corrosion circuits and equipment, primary damage modes in these circuits, critical operating limits (IOW) and the appropriate operating philosophy to prevent and control corrosion, optimize inspections, and drive appropriate reliability and safe practices.
In order to mitigate the complexity of different types of data and in-depth technical insights captured in a CCD, a digitalized CCD solution (CorrExpert®-eCCD) has been developed to provide a framework to easily identify and monitor the most critical aspects of refinery operating units, in terms of specific piping and equipment, key corrosion loops and damage mechanisms. This framework is designed to dynamically link to the process historian and Integrity Data Management Systems (IDMS) to monitor key process parameters as well as pinpoint specific aspects of unit performance to ensure operational integrity. The ability to correlate potential corrosion damage to dynamically linked process limits leads to implementation of real time, dynamic IOWs to correlate corrosion to true parametric damage drivers, leading to improved unit productivity and profitability.
