Journal of Petroleum & Environmental Biotechnology

Structural integrity, remaining life and creep damage assessment of service exposed components of petrochemical industries

2^nd World Congress on Petrochemistry and Chemical Engineering

October 27-29, 2014 Embassy Suites Las Vegas, USA

Ashok Kumar Ray

Keynote: J Pet Environ Biotechnol

Abstract:

This work highlights quantification of normalized creep damage incorporating uncertainty with respect to Larson?Miller parameter (LMP) at various intervals (with service exposure) of a 55 years service exposed reactor and distillation column materials of a petrochemical industry. Usually, remaining life is predicted from extrapolation of stress vs. LMP plot without incorporating the uncertainty involved in calculation of LMP values. Uncertainty involved in calculating LMP value has been given prime importance in this work because it is a function of rupture time. Variability of normalized creep damage for reactor and column materials is well approximated with the aid of Weibull distribution. As expected, it is observed that the distributions shift towards the higher range of damage with increase in service exposure time. Utilization of appropriate inspection during plant shut down, in combination with high temperature mechanical properties, microstructural analysis and judicious accelerated creep provided an effective strategy for short term assessment of 11 years service exposed reformer tube integrity. Barring development of corrosion cracks and decarburization of the inner and outer walls of the tube, the microstructure of the service-exposed alloy was free from any signs of deterioration like creep cavitation or voids, and the hardness was within the expected ranges; however, tensile testing revealed an apparent loss of strength from 25 o C to 900 o C. Accelerated 900?980 o C stress rupture testing of samples machined from 11 years at 950 o C and 19 MPa exposed KHR 35 CT reformer steel tubing, did not reveal any degradation of rupture behaviour compared to that of the virgin alloy. An additional life of at least 32,822 h is predicted at the operating stress?temperature conditions. In addition a few case studies would be discussed in the meeting.

Biography :

Ashok Kumar Ray is presently working as chief scientist and group leader of Material Testing and Evaluation Section of Material Science and Technology Division at CSIR-National Metallurgical Laboratory, Jamshedpur, India. He did his PhD from IISC, Bangalore. He was also a post-doctoral fellow at Institut fur Werkstoffe der Energietechnik (IWE-1), Julich , Germany. His research activities cover mechanical properties of advanced ceramics, Thermal barrier coatings. Fatigue and fracture, creep, Remaining Life Assessment of components in power plants and petrochemical industries, Modeling, Failure analysis of engineering components and Titanium aluminide coatings. He has over 130 publications in national and international journals/conference proceedings. He is the receipient of many awards like MRSI (Materials Research Society of India) Medal Award (2008), B.R. Niwhwan Award (1996), Prof. V A Altekar Award for the Best Technology / Technological Service during 2009-2010, Engineering Achievement Award from The Institution of Engineers (India) in 2010, etc. He is a Fellow of The Institution of Engineers (FIE), Fellow of The Institution of Chemists (FIC), Chartered chemist from Inst. Chem (India) and Life Member of IIM, ISNT and MRSI.