Turnaround Support

Plant Turnaround Support Services

Plant Turnaround is the process of shutting down a unit or component to perform either preventative or routine maintenance for a scheduled period of time. Proper plant turnaround preparation and planning can have a positive impact on the reliability and integrity of an asset, in addition to reducing in the risk of unscheduled outages or failures.

Turnarounds (TAR) are high stakes activity where all the known issues are addressed via pre-TAR inspection, analysis and planning and the unknown unknowns are discovered and dealt with, all in real time. At Stress Engineering Services, we excel at providing comprehensive professional engineering support services in preparation for and during turnarounds.

Pre-Turnaround Support

Our engineers are frequently involved in TAR planning phase as early as two years in advance providing clients a broad range of fitness-for-service (FFS) support, which includes assessments of the current health of vessel or piping system in one of the operating units. To that end, we have made significant investments including our state-of-the-art high-temperature creep lab. This facility is used to facilitate remaining life assessments of high temperature plant, like heaters and reformers, to determine if repair or replacement is needed during the next scheduled TAR, or if a justification can be made to wait. The scope of Pre-TAR services offered by Stress Engineering Services includes:

•   Heater tube life calculations and creep testing
  •    TAR planning…will re-tubing be necessary?
•   Corrosion assessment
  •    Can LTAs make it to next TAR?
  •    Is repair required at next TAR?
•   FCCU hot spot analysis
  •    Can plant postpone repair to the next TAR?
•   Crack-assessment
  •    Can plant postpone repair to the next TAR
•   Vibration assessment – TAR planning…is replacement required at next TAR?
  •    Evaluation of small bore connection issues.
  •    Acoustic vibration – is system reconfiguration required?
  •    Structural vibration.
•   Welding procedure review.

Turnaround Support

Many of the most critical issues that arise during turnaround happen in real time and have to be addressed immediately, on-site. We can maintain a team of engineers, metallurgists and field technicians in the plant or on call to triage these issues as they arise. The scope of work can be very broad including; inspection, field metallurgical replication (FMR), metallurgical assessments, non-destructive scoop sampling to verify metallurgy, boat sampling, materials and weld procedure consultation and Acoustic Emission Testing . If necessary, we can put engineers on your site during turnaround with the experience and equipment necessary to conduct Level 3 FFS assessments.