Enhanced Analysis for Remaining Life Predictions and Lifetime Management of High Value Assets
Operators pay close attention to the condition of high value and process-critical equipment in order to assure the long term availability of these assets, while maintaining reliable high performance between turnarounds. It is a balancing act – long-term reliability/availability and performance optimization – made more difficult by the uncertainty of the Fitness-for-Service and remaining life of the equipment. For three specific high-value assets of the refining, process and power generation industries Quest Reliability brings together a set of specialized skills and capabilities in the LifeQuest™ service product line. The LifeQuest™ products include (click on the link to see more detail):
- LifeQuest™ Reformer, for steam reformer units in refineries, synthetic gas plants and other processing industries. In addition to custom FEA software incorporating a creep model specialized for the HP alloys that are used in most reformer tubes, this product includes a proprietary database of testing-based material properties for reformer tubes, and laboratory-based tube-catalyst interactions. The product also directly imports and analyzes tube inspection data from our proprietary LOTIS® system. LifeQuest™ Reformer provides reformer tube life extension and management capabilities that are unique and unmatched in the industry.
- LifeQuest™ Heater, for fired heater systems in refineries, petrochemcial plants, and other process industries. Our custom software is based on API 579 fitness-for-service standard. The service utilizes 100% of the FTISTM data and provides both a deterministic and probabilistic remaining life assessment.
- LifeQuest™ HEP, for high-energy piping such as superheater and reheater piping in thermal power stations. This product includes the custom FEA software, linkage to materials databases, and remaining life assessment based on the omega method of creep strain analysis. The custom FEA software includes specialized mesh geometries for girth welds and other features of interest in HEP systems.
Each of these products of our LifeQuest™ line, include:
- Specialized fracture mechanics, stress analysis and creep strain analysis software. These programs include custom spatial model generation editors with mesh geometries specialized for the equipment and components involved.
- Linkage to our materials properties databases (public and proprietary) including all conventional and many exotic alloy steels used in major high temperature plant, and corrosion-susceptible environments.
- Where applicable, linkage to our proprietary reformer tube and catalyst performance database, which addresses materials performance and material-catalyst interactions, introducing unique opportunities for performance optimization.
- Protocols for Finite Element Analysis (FEA), using both commercial and custom in-house pre-processors, solvers and visualization tools, integrated to the ABAQUS general stress analysis program.
- Built into the software and analytical protocols, specialized expertise in the physics and chemistry of welding and welds, based on our extensive experience analyzing the behavior of welds in a variety of stress and fracture regimes.
- Embedded customized remaining life prediction solvers, incorporating Monte-Carlo simulation to manage uncertainty of material properties, and advanced creep strain (Omega method) and failure analysis algorithms. These programs produce a probabilistic prediction of remaining life, along with sensitivity analysis data, useful for life extension, maintenance and inspection planning, and performance optimization.
In addition to the LifeQuest™ product line, Quest Reliability offers specialized remaining life assessment services for many other asset types. Due to diversity of their geometries and materials, Quest approaches remaining life assessment on a custom basis for these assets. We have experience with a variety of asset types in a variety of operating environments, but have specialized knowledge and a depth of experience in remaining life assessment for the following (click on the link to see more detail):
For further information about LifeQuest™, please contact us.