The Brownsville, Texas plant of Union Carbide Corporation is, in large part, seawater cooled and it is this cooling medium that has provided many of the corrosion problems which occur in the plant. Condenser tubes have, in several instances, failed in large numbers and with surprising rapidity from the seawater side. A good example of this is a pair of condensers which recently failed from seawater side pitting in January 1975. One bundle in particular, the Formic Acid Removal Column overhead condenser, will be the primary subject of this discussion. This bundle and its near twin have a history of failure since 1965. The last in this series of failures stimulated an effort to pinpoint the failure mechanism. The following discussion will consider a variety of possible failure mechanisms and an evaluation of the relative degree of importance to these seawater failures.

Subject
Water, Tubes, Sulfates, Walls, Carbonate scales, Seawater, Vapors, Copper alloys, Liquids, Condensers, Oxide scales, Scale, Sulfides
© 1976 Association for Materials Protection and Performance (AMPP). All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of AMPP. Positions and opinions advanced in this work are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of AMPP. Responsibility for the content of the work lies solely with the author(s).
1976
Association for Materials Protection and Performance (AMPP)
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