Corrosion Under Control with Automation
Imagine a color-coded “heatmap” of your plant where you can visually see the corrosion rate across the plant, or a graphical dashboard of remaining pipe thickness, in real-time. So you can tell if you are at risk, and where. All without manually collecting and interpreting the data. This is the vision of corrosion and integrity management. April 24th is the Corrosion Awareness Day by the World Corrosion Organization so like in previous years, let’s examine how the work of corrosion and integrity engineers is changing with HyperAutomation. And it doesn’t have to be difficult: no data cleansing, no modelling, no programming, no algorithm training, not even cloud if you don’t want to. You don’t have to be a data scientist or programmer to do this. You can just be a corrosion or integrity engineer working with your I&C team. What is the recommended practice? Here are my personal thoughts:
Risk: Loss of Containment Incidents
When corrosion of pipes, vessels, and other assets goes unchecked for ‘too long’ it will lead to pipe or vessel wall failure and loss of containment. This means production downtime, repair cost, potentially severe injuries and environmental impact, and product loss, to name a few. This includes fires and explosions. But how long is ‘too long’ between checks? It depends on the fluid, and in many plants the fluid is changing, such as different crudes for a refinery, or different product in a storage terminal. Temperature is another factor.
Past Limitation: Manual Corrosion Monitoring
Plants have kilometers/miles of pipe and hundreds of assets that are in contact with corrosive process fluids. This makes internal corrosion hard to manage. Most plants still use manual data collection to manage corrosion in most positions, but this started to change a few years ago. Many plants are now automating corrosion data in critical positions. Common manual and automatic corrosion data collection methods include:
Coupon requires periodic manual retrieval and lab testing and manual interpretation. Portable tester means periodic manual inspection with a handheld Ultrasonic Thickness (UT) tester or using Electrical Resistance (ER) or Linear Polarization Resistance (LPR) probe. Data logger with LR/LPR probe must have its data manually retrieved periodically. So all those monitoring options are manual. They are missing measurements. Because they are manual it is not practical to inspect frequently. Thus the inspection interval can be too long, you can’t tell corrosion rate and you can’t tell if the pipe or equipment is still safe at that operating pressure, and that’s how loss of containment incidents happens. Transmitter is the only automatic option, meaning data from UT, LR, or LPR probe is automatically sent to the analytics software where the data is automatically managed and interpreted to determine corrosion rate, internal surface roughness, and estimated retirement of the pipe section. Measurement update period can be daily or faster so it can be acted on before loss of containment occurs. Automated solutions did not yet exist when most plants were built, so corrosion monitoring is now being retrofitted. But if you are designing a new plant now, build in corrosion monitoring right from the beginning.
You could see this list as a corrosion management ‘maturity model’. If most of the corrosion positions are monitored through coupons, then the plant has the lowest level of maturity. If most of the positions are monitored by transmitters automatically sending daily updates, then you are at the highest level of maturity.
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Recommendation: Automatic Corrosion Monitoring
The recommendation is to deploy more automation to better manage corrosion and integrity; HyperAutomation including advanced sensors permanently installed, industrial networking, data management, and operational analytics. With this automation in place you have a better picture of your corrosion risk; how corrosive the feedstock is, see the effectiveness of corrosion inhibitor in real-time so you can inject more or less of the corrosion inhibitor, use another type of corrosion inhibitor, or change the crude blend to more or less of high-TAN opportunity crude to name one example. And you have a better picture of your corrosion impact; the actual wall thinning so you can estimate when you need to replace the pipe section.
Deployment can be relatively easy. Existing ER/LPR probes can be used. Existing coupon positions can be replaced by ER/LPR probes using the same fittings. UT sensors clamp onto the outside of the pipe. Your corrosion and integrity engineers know from experience which the critical positions are. That is, piping and vessels can be instrumented without cutting, drilling, or welding. It’s not even necessary to shut down the process. The most interesting fact is that many plants already have a sensing system based on a WirelessHART sensor network with gateways as part of their plant’s Digital Operational Infrastructure (DOI), if not, it is relatively easy to deploy and that same WirelessHART network benefits reliability, maintenance, energy/sustainability, production, quality, and HS&E teams as well. This automation is independent of the core process control (CPC) of the process itself performed by your DCS. This is part of a second layer of automation, beyond the P&ID, for monitoring and optimization (M+O). Your I&C engineers and automation vendor know how to do this.
Action Plan: Transformation by HyperAutomation
Industry 4.0, digital transformation, and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is all about industrial automation. This includes automation of integrity management tasks such as collection and interpretation of corrosion and erosion data. Here’s an action plan for which you can allocate a person responsible, date of completion, budget, and other resources:
Lead the way. Schedule a meeting for 24th April Corrosion Awareness Day or today. Share this essay with your integrity manager and process engineers now. And remember, always ask for product data sheet to make sure the software is proven, and pay close attention to software screen captures in it to see if it does what is promised without expensive customization. Well, that’s my personal opinion. If you are interested in digital transformation in the process industries click “Follow” by my photo to not miss future updates. Click “Like” if you found this useful to you and to make sure you keep receiving updates in your feed and “Share” it with others if you think it would be useful to them. Save the link in case you need to refer in the future.