Tom,
But as you are aware at Flixborough this thoughness was not employed but perhaps we have learnt our lesson.
I have sent Paul an article related to a failure investigation at a refinery in the UK. There the corrsion was identified and I am sure all the steps you descriibe were put in place but finally mamnagement didnt approve the budget or give the go a ahead or decided to adopt a higher risk profile.
Wasnt their a recent catastrophe at a BP refinery in the USA because management deferred the upgrade of a flare system?
It appears to me that it is not the professional engineers that are the problem but the management who use seat of the pants tools to do their job. If estimators do a quick and dirty number crunch to set a budget and then when the real engineers get involved and make allowance for all the things we have been discussing who gets the blame? The engineer for blowing the budget.
I see it my line of work of surge analysis all the time. Rarely does a company do a surge analysis at tender time. When they come to build the plant and need money for surge mitigation, or even the surge study, it becomes a dilemma.
I see your point about the pipe thickness calculator however I prefer the approach of having company standards of presure and temperature for each service, defined on the P&IDs. There is in built conservatism there.
I think this thread has come a long way since its inception but has allowed us to air our thoughts. Our opinions are not so different.
Happy Christmas
Geoff Stone
tomcruz55 <tomcruz55@yahoo.com> wrote:
Im familiar with the incident and a dozen more as Part of our competency program related to SHE. What ive said is not even near to what happen at Flexiborough. The last paragraph of my response is pretty much clear.
When a proposal is being made for a plant change such as piping work addition or mods or any work related to capital project, the very first thing that is needed is a justification - because resources will obviously have to be expended or it may have an impact on SHE or production.
Project justification or request for plant change these days require an estimate before committing more resources - to see if its worth pursuing then management need to rank it and of course allocate resoruces if approved and after a project plan. The project plan (im using a term that makes sense to most) will normally include a risk assessment, a HazOp and others in addition to ROI evaluation.
Like Ive said, an estimate is just an estimate. Need to pass more gates to make the estimate a reality. The keeper of these gates are experienced/license descipline engineers and managers familiar with the SHE requirement - either mandated by law or following generally accepted engineering practice.
In my book, A prelim calc is not a license to proceed. Meaning theres no committment, no labor or material, no construction details, no scope of work. In short, no ka-boom.
YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS Visit your group "PipingDesign" on the web.
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: <a href="/group/PipingDesign/post?postID=SN_KD1OobiFi7l9JvFT5B_r03m0WMmByrZrsYjSI9ZF8FV0DYiwZi1vh7jN7yEAcWk1MnAGqPjFCJuSlMqjIF7Aff3hM-lkrxIXWxG6R7e5n">PipingDesign-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com</a>
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.
Design Detail and Development (a division of Blenray Pty Ltd)
Mail Address PO Box 1351 Castle Hill NSW 1765 Australia Tel Mob 0402 35 2313
Office 02 8850 2313 AH 02 8850 2324
We specialise in pipe network and waterhammer analysis, pipe stress analysis,
the design of buried pipelines and thermoplastic pipe systems.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed] Received on Wed Dec 21 17:54:00 2005
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Tue Mar 04 2008 - 11:40:45 EST