Everyone is aware of the extreme financial penalties and, more importantly, the potential dangers associated with sudden or long-term heat exchanger tube failures.
These failures and related emergency shutdowns presently cost the downstream industry millions of dollars per day and billions of dollars per year on a worldwide basis.
In 1985, CTI Industries in Orange, Connecticut, developed a technology that extends the service life of new or eroded/ corroded heat exchanger tubes: the Full Length Tube Linerâ¢.
If the tubes' failure mechanism is limited to the tube ends only, CTI has a proven solution: the CTI Shield/Sealâ¢, which was introduced 10 years earlier.
CTI Industries has over 40 years of experience increasing the reliability of heat exchanger tubes, whether responding to an emergency repair or working with new heat exchanger equipment, to ensure long-term reliability.
CTI liners are thin-walled alloy tubes hydraulically expanded the full length into the existing heat exchanger tubes. They can be constructed from a variety of erosion-/corrosion-resistant alloys. This allows the metallurgist to select a material that will resolve the specific problem of the exchanger tubes in question
Twelve years ago, the BP Carson Refinery was the first refinery in the U.S. to install CTI Full Length Tube Liners into new carbon steel finned tubes.
The major factors that prompted BP's metallurgist and team of reliability engineers to utilize this technology were the historical problems experienced with these units in previous years, including the following:
- Accelerated corrosion rate of the parent tubes.
- In-service tube failures leading to unscheduled shutdowns.
- Undersized water wash and unequal water wash distribution.
- Non-desaltable (phantom) chlorides.
- Chemical inhibition program could not manage the corrosion issues. Rather than wait for these failures and related production losses to occur, the decision was made by BP to contract CTI Industries to install 778 liners manufactured from Hastelloy C276 material into each of the two overhead air finned coolers.
Since that time, oil companies such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, Phillips 66, Shell, SK Energy, and Total, to name a few, have utilized this technology at numerous refineries across the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia and South Africa.
CTI's Full-Length Tube Liner technology is also being utilized around the world in numerous LNG plants and terminals.
CTI can work in tandem with design engineering and inspection/reliability groups resulting in a proactive preventative maintenance program. It starts by closely monitoring the tubes during the scheduled turnaround, and inspecting, measuring and documenting the condition of tube IDs, and may include temporary plugging of tubes with severe wall loss.
Once installed, CTI tube liners can be routinely inspected via conventional NDT methods to monitor their condition and therefore can be considered a permanent repair.
Depending on the type of exchanger and the application, metallurgists often select alloys such as 304/316 Stainless Steel, Alloy 825 or C-276 to extend the service life of their tubes.
Since 2000, CTI has installed thousands of Full-Length Tube Liners at locations in the U.S. from Southern Texas to the north slope of Alaska.
For more information, visit www. cti-ind.com or call (800) 446-0060.
