Current Issue: August 2019

This article is a continuation of Part 1, which discussed the evaluation of two damaged wear rings from centrifugal pump applications—a stationary (inner) ring and a rotating (outer) ring.

Pump lubrication deficiencies are often denied, and the outstanding reliability performance of oil mist is vastly underreported.

Some basic, yet insightful, machinery reliability tracking tools are introduced here that can be developed with common spreadsheet applications, such as Excel.

Industrial facilities, such as refineries and petrochemical plants, have many systems and equipment that must relieve steam or gases through discharge piping to the atmosphere to avoid overpressure and protect the installation.

How would you measure the volume of a can of soup? The height should work, but what about diameter? Or, you can possibly just trust what the manufacturer has told you on the label.

The chemical industry uses flush rings for diaphragm seals.

It is always a challenge to reconfigure and resize existing reboilers, especially vertical thermosiphon ones, for the revised design and operating conditions of a brownfield project, since hydraulics external to the reboiler must match the reboiler hydraulics under the revamped conditions to ensure trouble-free operation.

Asset life assessment (ALA) has become a strategic tool for process plants (e.g., petrochemical, chemical, and oil and gas) to determine the extent of degradation and the ability of assets to bear static and dynamic loads while sustaining the desired production processes.

Coke drums are expensive equipment with a long manufacturing cycle, so a realistic and accurate life prediction can save significant time and money.

The plate-and-shell (P&S) heat exchanger has three significant advantages over the shell-and-tube (S&T) type traditionally used in refinery processes.

Process industries across the globe grapple with producing dozens or even hundreds of different products.

Relief calculation is one of the most discussed aspects of chemical engineering design.

From refining to chemical production processes, heaters play an essential role in hydrocarbon processing applications.

Oil refineries and petrochemical plants rely on steam systems to maintain utility and process unit operations.

Heavy industries like refining, petrochemicals and mining face concerns about the availability of freshwater, as these are affected by local water scarcities and stringent water discharge regulations.

In mid-June, I joined Thad Pittman, Senior Research Analyst, Hydrocarbon Processing’s Construction Boxscore Database, to provide Hydrocarbon Processing subscribers with a global analysis on the downstream processing industry’s capital projects landscape.

While on consulting assignments, observant reliability engineers often uncover (or rediscover) failure initiators that their long-departed colleagues experienced years ago.

Hydrocarbon Processing sat down with senior-level executives of Merichem Company, Cyndie Fredrick (CF) and Kathy Young (KY), Senior Vice Presidents and General Managers of Merichem’s two business units, to discuss the state of the downstream industry, where it is heading in the future and how their company is helping operators meet their sustainability goals.

In late June, Hydrocarbon Processing announced the finalists for its third annual awards.

A bit of advice for players in the petrochemical market: Hold on to your hats!

Hydrocarbon Processing’s Construction Boxscore Database is tracking more than 1,300 projects around the world.

Grab your cowboy boots: Gastech returns to Houston, Texas

The US gasoline market received a boost from a gasoline supply outage on the East Coast, despite overall supply-side pressure resulting from higher regional refinery intakes.