Piping and Pipeline Assessment Guide

Piping and Pipeline Assessment Guide

This book is written to be an assessment guide from the plant engineering, pipeline engineering and operations perspective. It is intended to serve as a guide for the practicing plant and pipeline engineer, operations personnel, and central engineering groups in operating companies. It will serve as a helpful guide for those in the engineering and construction companies to provide insight to plant and pipeline operations from their client’s eyes and to writing specifications and procedures. It also will offer engineering students a perspective about plant and pipeline operations for a more productive career. Also the book will be a helpful guide for plant and pipeline inspectors who are so critical to the satisfactory operation of plant and pipeline facilities. The role and function of inspectors cannot be over emphasized.

The book is a fitness-for-service guide with emphasis on remediation of piping and pipelines containing flaws. The book is divided into eight chapters.

Chapter 1 is about the basic concepts of fitness-for-service based on the work of the great pioneer Dr. John F. Kiefner and others who developed the field in the 1960s. The field of fracture mechanics was in its early stages of development, but the work by Kiefner, et al., served to translate the theory into practical use in pipelines.

Chapter 2 is about the ASME piping and pipeline codes and the basic equations.

Chapter 3 is fitness-for-service based on the API RP 579 with emphasis on local thin areas, plain dents, dents-gouges, grooves, and crack-like flaws for piping. The methodology of the API 579 is reorganized into methodology that simplifies the assessment for the practitioner. In Chapter 3, there is an extensive discussion about mechanical damage mechanisms.

Chapter 4 is about the concerns of brittle fracture and how to assess it. After the basic fitness-for-service for piping is presented.

Chapter 5 concerns piping support mechanisms and the vital role they play in plant operations. This chapter discusses the maintenance function of plants and how various supports affect piping loads must be considered in fitness-for-service assessments.

Chapter 6 is about piping maintenance and repairs with the emphasis on remediation of piping with flaws. This material is based on years of operating experience and combines into one chapter remediation techniques to solve maintenance and repair problems. Chapter 7 is about hot tapping and freezing. These techniques are invaluable in plant and pipeline operations to maintain operability of existing piping and pipelines. Finally, Chapter 8 is exclusively about pipelines with an insight of how the methodology of the API RP 579 can be used with pipelines. Currently the API RP 579 does not cover pipelines, but the methodology presented will help pipeline engineers and operators with methods to assess pipelines. Cathodic protection is briefly covered with a discussion about pigging technology and the various types of pigs and how they are used to detect mechanical flaws.

Next remediation is discussed with presentations of various repair techniques in pipelines with a summary table from the upcoming ASME B31.4 classifying repair techniques and their limitations. Finally, there is a discussion concerning buried pipelines, the thermal expansion and consequent bowing of pipelines and practical solutions.

All chapters contain examples based on actual field problems. The author has tried to give examples in both the American Engineering System (AES—English or Imperial) of units and the metric SI unit system. This book is intended for world-wide use, so it is proper to present both unit systems. Also the metric SI unit system is now the preferred system in the ASME codes. However, the book is slanted toward the English system of units, but there are discussions about proper conversions between the systems. There are examples in the metric SI unit system. This should help U.S. engineers to become better acquainted with the metric SI system. It is expected over time that the metric SI system will become standard use everywhere; acknowledging that there are those, for obvious reasons, emotionally attached to one particular system of units.

For many years there were design codes for new equipment. Standards and recommended practices for assessing existing equipment were slower in development. Like the reasons for developing the ASME design codes for new equipment, operational problems in the plants and pipelines and explosions dictated the need for fitness-for-service.

When writing this book, the author thought of the many times he was called out to the plant in the middle of the night to face an operational problem. The specialists and support personnel were thousands of miles away and were not available for the situation. Many successful engineering solutions are performed in the far-away jungles or deserts of the world. It is against that background that this book has been developed. One classic example is having a contractor undersize several spring supports, and the engineer being faced with the hazard of a very hot pipe that contains a highly explosive and toxic process fluid trying to thermally expand and cannot because the springs have bottomed out and have locked-up to become rigid hangers. Spring hangers can’t be delivered for weeks, so improvising is a must. Another situation is facing the leakage of a toxic substance because of a crack, and faced with placing a clamp in service in a hostile environment. These events have happened, do happen, and will continue to happen.

One purpose of this book is to assess such failures and prevent them from happening. The other is to show tools available to correct the problem when it occurs. This book is the first volume in a series called the Stationary Equipment Assessment Series, or SEAS. The following volumes in this series will include assessment guides for pressure vessels and tubular exchangers and various other types of stationary equipment. The SEAS series is based on authentic actual field problems at facilities throughout the world.

This series is written to provide helpful guides for mechanical engineers, plant operators, pipeline operators, maintenance engineers, plant engineers and inspectors, and pipeline engineers and inspectors, materials specialists, consultants, contractors, and academicians.

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