Papers by Keyword: Quantitative Approach

Abstract: One of the most common external corrosion failures in petroleum and power industry is due to corrosion under insulation (CUI). The difficulty in corrosion monitoring has contributed to the scarcity of corrosion rate data to be used in Risk-Based Inspection (RBI) analysis for degradation mechanism due to CUI. Limited data for CUI presented in American Petroleum Institute standard, (API 581) reflected some uncertainty for both stainless steels and carbon steels which limits the use of the data for quantitative RBI analysis. The objective of this paper is to present an adaptive neural based fuzzy model to estimate CUI corrosion rate of carbon steel based on the API data. The simulation reveals that the model successfully predict the corrosion rates against the values given by API 581 with a mean absolute deviation ( MAD ) value of 0.0005, within that the model is also providing its outcomes for those values even for which API 581 has not given its results. The results from this model would provide the engineers to do necessary inferences in a more quantitative approach.

Abstract: Risk-based inspection (RBI) guideline based on API 581 provides a methodology for calculating the risks of equipment in refinery or petrochemical plant. However, there is a major limitation of its application to the petrochemical plant directly since only a representative material is considered in calculating the risk, especially in part of the consequence of failure, even though the equipment is composed of numerous materials. The objectives of this paper are to develop an enhanced RBI program to resolve shortcoming inclusive of the above issue and to evaluate the risks of equipment in petrochemical plant using the program. In this respect, the mole fractions of materials were used to fully incorporate the characteristics of different materials. The proposed RBI program consists of qualitative, semi-quantitative and quantitative risk evaluation modules in which toxic materials as well as representative materials were selected automatically for comparison with those in the current guideline. The RBI program has been applied to evaluate the risks of equipment in Naphtha Cracking Center (NCC) which is a typical facility of petrochemical plant. Thereby, promising evaluation results were obtained and applicability of the proposed RBI program was proven.