For those charged with the responsibility of ensuring plant reliability and maximizing up time, the performance dependability of construction materials is critical. In the petrochemical, refining and power generation industries, there is always a balancing act between maximizing plant output and minimizing risk of failure and forced outages. Quest Reliability has for over 30 years, performed research aimed at selecting materials and optimizing their life cycle performance under elevated temperature environments. These activities have allowed plant owners to improve reliability and performance while maintaining a thorough understanding of the associated risks. Examples of such research projects include:
- Modelling and verifying the effect of in-service aging on the creep strength of reformer tube alloys, including the effect of alloy content variation
- Examination of the embrittlement of cast reformer outlet manifold alloys and development of weld repair methodologies
- Optimization of reformer outlet pigtail performance
- Creation of methodologies for detection of High Temperature Hydrogen Attack
- Embrittlement of high temperature bolting materials
- Creep-fatigue behavior of welds in high energy piping systems
- Assessment of material performance in carburizing environments and metal dusting/carburization resistance
- Establishment of methodologies for detection of carburization in ethylene cracker tubes and related materials
- Reliable and accurate measurement of actual metal operating temperature
- Elastic and elasto-plastic finite element analysis methodologies to understand stress and hence remaining life in complex geometries
- Design of flare-tips to improve reliability
The operator benefits arising from such research projects include:
- Enhanced understanding of useful remaining life
- Ability to make risk-balanced replace-repair-run decisions
- Defining an operating envelope and understanding the reliability impact associated with operational changes
- Ability to confidently increase production rates through an enhanced understanding of risk
- Improved inspection reliability
- Development of procurement specifications for greater performance and reliability
- Ability to audit OEM design specifications for continuous improvement of operation and maintenance
In support of research activities, Quest Reliability maintains comprehensive laboratory facilities with the following capabilities:
Creep testing
- Stress rupture and fully instrumented creep testing.
- Life assessment testing to approved standard procedures including API-579-1/ASME FFS-1 (Omega) methodology
- Design and build of customised test facilities
- Creep fatigue test facilities
- Creep stress relaxation testing
- Creep strain and strain rate measurement
- Thermal environments up to 1200 °C in varying atmospheres
High Temperature Corrosion [More…]
- Metal dusting test facilities including high pressure to 40 bar
- Thermo-gravimetric analysis
- High temperature gases and gas mixtures (H2S, HCl, CO2, CO, O2)
- Development of on-line monitoring methodologies
Stress Analysis
For further information about High Temperature Performance Research, please contact us.