Online Corrosion Monitoring

[edukes]

I'm trying to upgrade my refinery from the current manual ER probes to an online corrosion monitoring system. I know there are plenty of choices on the market, so which one did your companies decided to go with and what are the benefits/drawbacks?

 

[cloa]

If you want people to give feedback on such an open question, its best to give a fuller description of your situation so they know you are serious. Is there a defined need to upgrade or is just we have the money so we'd like more convenience? What is your situation with type and number of measuring points? Condition and age and life remaining of plant etc.

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[edukes]

Thanks for the suggestion, cloa. Let me elaborate a bit. The plant was constructed in the late 1970s. We use the ER data along with UT and other nondestructive examination results to plan for piping and equipment inspection and replacement/retirement dates. In addition, every 5 years the plant comes down for turnarounds in which we inspect and replace equipment/piping. We currently have a system of 49 manual ER probes with about 8 of the flanged type and the remainder retractable. For the time being, we send techs to collect the corrosion data from each of the probes on a weekly or as-needed basis. The resulting data is obviously discontinuous when plotted and difficult to correlate back to the actual process conditions at the time of measurement. To bridge some of these gaps, we'd like to request the funds from next year's budget to install an online corrosion monitoring system that will automatically log corrosion data and sync up with our operations control systems (Honeywell TDC 1000). We are open to adding probes in other locations, but may be limited due to process conductivity if LPR is the primary measuring technique. I'd appreciate others sharing their experiences with online corrosion monitoring systems including the type of measurements and probes used.

 

[SJones]

There aren't really that many choices of system suppliers. Do your research, get the main players in to have a look, and have them submit detailed proposals including a design document. The selection of monitoring technique(s) should be based not only on the fluid but the ultimate goal that is to be achieved with the monitoring process which you will have to communicate to them in some detail. What's wrong with the dataloggers on the ER probes that is making the data discontinuous?

Steve Jones
Corrosion Management Consultant

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All answers are personal opinions only and are in no way connected with any employer.