COATING PETROCHEMICAL FACILITIES:A MATTER OF TIME

摘要

The year 1984 was a great time to be a young up-and-coming(future)industrial-paint expert.Coating technology was improving significantly,partly as a response to newly enacted or pending legislation,and partly because of improved technology.Every oil-company headquarters and regional office,and sometimes even individual plants,had a knowledgeable”paint guy.”His office bookshelf was crammed with loose-leaf binders,and always prominent among them were two large red bound books-the two-volume set of the SSPC Standards:”SSPC Surface Preparation”and”SSPC Coating Systems.”Maintenance of offshore drilling rigs and production platforms led technology.Environmental conditions were severe,to say the least,and wise owners realized the huge replacement costs involved.Abrasive blasting and coating application on-site at offshore facilities were so difficult and costs were so high that using the best coatings made sense.One coat of inorganic zinc over perfect surface preparation was tried and worked for some.More common were multicoat systems like a five-coat vinyl system that had a 15-minute recoat interval but was loaded with lead and had volume solids in the 25% range.Offshore maintenance had full-time inspectors on every project,partly because once the inspector got to the structure,there was nowhere else for him to go.The inspector walked around with a tally book in his back pocket and wrote a nightly report in longhand with smeary carbon-paper copies if the structure didn't yet have a copy machine.