Evaluating the Wear of Equipment and Pipelines on Units at the Astrakhan Gas-Processing Plant

Abstract

which takes into account the procedures prescribed by Gosgortekhnadzor (State Committee of the Council of Ministers for the Supervision of Industrial Safety and Mine Inspection) [3] into account. While the safe life of the “general population of engi neering systems currently being designed” is determined at design stage, during the operating stage it is necessary to evaluate the individual remaining safe life on the basis of data from diagnostic evaluations of the technical condition of the equipment . The remaining safe life may be considerably greater than the design safe life. Standardized methods exist for calculating remaining safe life and have been realized in the form of GOSTs (All-Russia State Standards), patents, and industry-wide procedural materials. The equipment at the Astrakhan Gas-Processing Plant (AGPZ) has now outlived the safe life guaranteed by the design and the manufacturer. The AGPZ is either evaluating the condition of the equipment in accordance with the specifications for the given unit or is enlisting the help of specialized organizations that diagnose CESs in accordance with the requirements of RD 09-102-95 and Gosgortekhnadzor [3]. The procedures that must be followed when evaluating the condition of equipment and pipelines, estimating wear, and calculating remaining safe life [3] are proving to be cumbersome and expensive. Moreover, the results that are obtained must be corroborated on a yearly basis. VNIIGAZ has proposed a formalized method of evaluating a limited number of parameters of the actual technical state and corrosive wear of the production equipment at the AGPZ [4, 5]. The Institute has identified the main types of equipment failure and four factors that cause wear: corrosional; functional; technological; temporal . The requirements of GOST [5] were used to formulate the concept of 100% failure, which corresponds to 100% wear of the equipment based on the given index or parameter for each wear factor. Calculations are performed to determine (in percent) the loss coefficient of the index for the fiscal year, i.e., to determine the ratio of the fraction of its actual loss to t he value that corresponds to 100% wear based on the given index. To the extent that the wear indices for one factor ( n) contribute to the calculated result, an equivalent amount of weight is given to the coefficients ( K i ) that go into the arithmetic mean or weighted mean value of the wear coefficient for the given equipment unit: