Abstract
Corrosion and Integrity Management (CIM) covers several elements such as policy, strategy, resources etc. For effective implementation and supervision, these should be also supported by an integrated IT platform for analysis and communication. There’s a lot of hype about the Digital Transformation or the Industrial Internet of Things and their roles in supporting corrosion and integrity management. Digital Transformation at its core, is a simple concept – to harness the immense power of plant and process data in a seamless, cloud enabled digital environment to achieve superior process efficiencies, productivity, and reliability. This has important implications from connectivity of real time operating data, automated predictive analytics, increased collaboration – and finally, the quantitative impact on the process of managing corrosion. Over the last 20+ years, a number of research initiatives to effectively manage corrosion assessment, damage mitigation and asset integrity management in refinery unit operations were conducted by Honeywell International Inc. sponsored by global, industry-leading refining and engineering companies. Results of these research efforts formed the foundation for corrosion prediction models for multiple corrosion damage mechanisms including naphthenic and sulfidic corrosion, ammonium bisulfide corrosion and ammonium chloride corrosion. The by-product of these comprehensive efforts is a real time corrosion software sensor framework built around industry leading corrosion prediction models.
This paper provides an overview of the real time prediction technology and implementation of software sensor solution at refinery units. The “software sensor” solution is capable of also incorporating off-line data, manually collected data such as corrosion coupon data or even laboratory analysis results to deliver an accurate and comprehensive characterization of corrosion and reliability.
