| Date | November/December 2010 |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Return to Journal Index | |
November/December 2010 Inspectioneering Journal Article Index
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November/December 2010 Inspectioneering JournalBy Sanjoy Das at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, B.K. Shah at BARC, and D. Mukherjee at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre
Rapid industrial and technological growth throughout the world makes it necessary to develop new materials along with advanced Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) Methods to ensure their quality without premature failures. The complex modern system, where materials are required to perform consistently with optimum efficiency, demands stringent quality control of engineered components.
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November/December 2010 Inspectioneering JournalBy John Reynolds at IntertekHigh Temperature Hydrogen Attack (HTHA) is a long known and still occurring degradation issue for fixed equipment construction materials in the hydrocarbon process industry where hydroprocess plants (hydrogen plus hydrocarbons) are in service. Though HTHA failures in these units are the focus of this article, it is important to recognize that HTHA damage can also occur in high pressure boiler tubes, hydrogen producing units, synthetic gas units, ammonia plants and other equipment where hydrocarbons may not be involved but high temperatures are involved.
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November/December 2010 Inspectioneering Journal
On April 6, 2010, a tragic accident occurred at the Tesoro Refinery in Anacortes, WA, in the Naphtha Hydrotreater process unit (NHT). During routine operations involving an on-line switching of unit heat exchanger feed trains, seven employees were killed immediately, or died later of thermal burn injuries sustained when a feed-effluent heat exchanger catastrophically failed due to high temperature hydrogen attack (HTHA), releasing a hot, pressurized flammable hydrocarbon/hydrogen mixture which ignited. Tesoro released its investigative results to the media on September 01, 2010.
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November/December 2010 Inspectioneering Journal
Per a report in Downstream Today, by Whitney Pipkin Skagit Valley Herald, Mount Vernon, Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News on August 30, 2010, "Tesoro Anacortes Refinery announced Friday what investigators determined was the likely cause of an April 2 blast that killed seven workers."
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November/December 2010 Inspectioneering Journal
Understanding, predicting, detecting and controlling high-temperature hydrogen attack (HTHA), have been elusive goals of materials engineers and scientists for over 70 years. The destruction of low alloy steel components exposed to hydrogen through the formation in the microstructure of high-pressure methane bubbles has led to many failures, fires, and sometimes deaths.
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November/December 2010 Inspectioneering JournalThe following references are from the American Petroleum Institute. They are widely used in the petroleum refining and petrochemical industries for managing equipment in HTHA service and are available in the public domain.
