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Is it more costly to purchase a heat exchanger or to operate and maintain it? The answer is not so straight forward especially since capital expenditure budgets have little to do with maintenance budgets or utility costs. None the less, a refinery must pay to acquire a heat exchanger and then pay the maintenance and operating expenses on that equipment until it is retired. Like many things in industry, the price of equipment is given far more scrutiny than are lifecycle operating costs. This leads equipment designers to build heat exchangers from multiple dissimilar metals and then further overbuild a corrosion allowance in an attempt to grant an exchanger a certain usable life before corrosion retires it. The problem is corrosion rates can be very difficult to predict and process conditions change frequently. Even if corrosion rates are well understood, localized corrosion can occur unexpectedly from difficult to forecast conditions and localized corrosion can be orders of magnitude more aggressive than general corrosion. Otherwise inspection would never inspect heat exchangers and planners would never schedule work on an outage; but we know that they are inspected and maintained on outages so the system while workable is imperfect.
Rather than placing dissimilar metals together in a corrosive environment, or banking on corrosion allowances, Belzona offers a simple and economically attractive solution; isolate the metal from the corrosive environment. A properly selected and installed coating is more than capable of preventing both localized and general corrosion in refinery environments for decades. In fact, protective coatings can do quite a bit more in a heat exchanger than just stop corrosion. Consider the potential extra operating expenses of short circuiting. It is usually only a matter of time before division bars corrode and fail to seal against end covers allowing short circuiting in multipass exchangers. This type of repair is ideally suited to Belzona since our products are electrically inert and thus permanently prevent reoccurrence. It is also less expensive and faster than welding and machining which will only reset the clock and does nothing at all to eliminate the root cause of the problem.
Belzona has been working closely with virtually every refining company on the globe for decades. We understand the prevailing conditions, needs, and idiosyncrasies of this industry and it remains Belzona’s most important sector year after year. We look forward to working with inspectors, planners, maintenance, and engineering staff at your site in an effort to increase asset availability and minimize expenses both capital and operating.
Stephanie Rumford
srumford@rumfordgroup.com
937-435-4650
RumfordGroup.com
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