Condition Assessment is a term that is often used by people in our business, but it can have several different meanings:

• Condition Assessment as a synonym for “Fitness-For-Service”: Condition assessment can refer to an engineering evaluation of the physical condition of a piece of equipment or a component in which damage or a flaw has been detected.  The focus of such an evaluation is to determine if the equipment can continue in service, and if so, for how long.  For a number of types of equipment, industry standards such as API 579-1 specify a quantitative procedure for making a fitness-for-service determination, but for many other equipment or component types there are no such standards.  In those cases, a semi-quantitative or qualitative approach, often including a remaining life prediction, may be used to reach a decision on whether the equipment should continue in service.  Quest Reliability performs fitness-for-service assessments , using API 579-1 where required or appropriate, and utilizes other analytical protocols for fitness-for-service where other circumstances apply.
  
  
• Condition Assessment as a synonym for “damage evaluation, life prediction and operating recommendations”: Customers frequently request an evaluation of piece of equipment showing some damage, or components that have failed, and request a determination of what conditions caused the damage, what exactly the damage is, through which mechanisms the damage developed, if the equipment or component has not yet failed, then what is the estimated remaining life considering a specific damage mechanism, and what are the operating recommendations that would prevent damage in the future or permit continued operation of the damaged equipment in the present.  Quest Reliability performs this type of condition assessment in conjunction with an FFS evaluation, or a failure investigation, or a materials consulting and research assignment.  Our specialized skills in computational mechanics  and metallurgy, and our materials testing laboratories are frequently involved in these condition assessments.
  
  
• Condition assessment as a synonym for “inspection”: Physical inspection of tubes, piping and pressure vessels in process plants – using ultrasonics and laser profilometry, and magnetic field measurements, among other specialized NDT tools – produces data that describe the condition of equipment and its components, and provide evidence of many types of macro- and micro-scale damage.  These data are used in the fitness-for-service and damage evaluations described above, or are often used in simple visualizations that help to characterize the variability of operating parameters (e.g., temperature fluctuation and distribution in a fired process heater) in a large or complex piece of equipment.  Quest Reliability provides, either on its own or through its sister inspection company Quest TruTec, inspection-oriented condition assessment services using a suite of proprietary technologies.

For further information about Condition Assessment, please contact us.