Assessment process improvement on corroded oil pipeline by integrating web-based database system and computer aided engineering

摘要

Damage assessment of transportation components in the petrochemical industry is most important for keeping the operation and humans safe. Traditionally, the inspector derived the measured data of damaged components by non-destructive examination. Those data will be transferred to plant engineers to evaluate the lifetime using the existed specification, such as API-579. However, some flaw configuration or types are not illustrated in the assessment criteria. A computer aided analysis should be conducted to obtain more accurate stress distribution or further structural properties. Whole procedures need communication and always spend a lot of time. In this paper, an interactive website is implemented for integrating the component database and computer-aided engineering software to improve the process of corrosion assessment. The geometry and loading conditions of the component are obtained from the existing web-based database system. The corroded configuration can be derived from the collected inspection data. For simulating the stress distribution of the component structure, the commercial software ANSYS is conducted, and the simulation process is activated by APDL script language. Two case studies are examined and show the feasibility of the integration. It is promised that implementation can assist the service condition monitoring and decision system of petrochemical plant to reduce the operation cost and tracking time.