Gerrit Buchheim, P.E.: About the Author
Corrosion & Materials Expert and Pono Division Manager, Becht
Gerrit Buchheim P.E. is a BS/MS Metallurgical Engineer (Carnegie Mellon University) who has 42 years of refining experience working in several refineries and central groups for half his career at Exxon, BP, and then the other half in the consulting industry. He has worked on HTHA issues for his entire career, has been a member of the API 941 TG for decades and is extremely active in API committees. He has acted as chair/vice chair of many API task groups or as technical editor, including API 571, API 939-C, API 970, API 945, and several NACE task groups re wet H2S cracking. He is a charter member of the API 579-1/ASME FFS-1, and chair of Part 7 HIC/blistering evaluation. He joined Becht in 2014 and formed the Pono (Materials/Corrosion/Fixed Equipment Integrity Management) Division. Since then, he has built the group to be the premier refining Materials/Corrosion and Integrity Management consulting group, comprising over 65 team members with collectively over 1400 years of refining and chemicals industry experience. Mr. Buchheim conducts damage reviews as part of CCD/IOW, RBI, projects and his group specializes in IOW/CCD documentation and RBI, Integrity Management and corrosion troubleshooting. Almost all of his team members have worked for owner-users and most for their entire careers and they embody the notion of providing solutions from an owner’s perspective.
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Published Articles
This article describes HTHA predictive modeling advances that are designed to demonstrate a direct integration with inspection such that modeling and inspection can be leveraged together in a way never done before.
This article presents a model to better predict the corrosivity of hot crude oil streams, which is based on open literature going back for almost 60 years and incorporates published information from joint industry projects (JIPs).
Nelson curves, which are the foundation of the industry’s HTHA programs, can be tied to mechanistic models from several sources, allowing the recreation of Nelson curves for different operational histories and time durations.
This article provides background on HTHA, discusses some current developments in HTHA inspection and mitigation, and describes how one refiner is instituting an HTHA risk management plan for its refineries along with challenges they have encountered.
High temperature sulfidation is probably the most well- known corrosion mechanism in the oil refining industry because it occurs in large sections of the refinery.
With the publication of API RP 579 For Fitness-For-Service and the planned publication of API RP 580 for Risk Based Inspection in 2001, these technologies will find increasing application in maintenance and inspection planning.
The release of API RP579 will bring about some changes to other existing API standards. The plan is to offer an integrated suite of API standards, where information is presented once and the other documents refer and are linked to that information.