Case Studies of Corrosion Failures due to Poor Design and Non-Optimized Materials Selection

摘要

For the design and materials selection of equipment in a chemical plant, the focus is often mainly on the "chemicals" side but it is often water (steam or cooling water) that causes the corrosion issues in many cases. This paper presents two cases that demonstrate poor design and non-optimized materials selection, causing severe corrosion and cracking issues. In both cases, the equipment is a fixed tubesheet type of heat exchangers (one is vertical, and another is horizontal) and the materials are mainly 300 series stainless steels. These two cases also demonstrate that such premature failures could be prevented by either design or proper materials selection.