Pull up a chair; it’s story time.
At a Gulf Coast refinery, an operator noticed something off about a high-pressure heat exchanger last fall. Just a subtle performance dip, which could be attributed to throughput variability. The operator flagged it as low priority because there wasn’t room in the budget to build scaffolding to fully assess the exchanger.
One particularly cold day in January, it failed. A weld seam, compromised by months of undetected corrosion under insulation and freeze-thaw thermal cycling, gave way under load. The operator called their repair contractor and waited two weeks for a qualified crew to arrive on-site. Finally, the repair was complete. Someone suggested heat treatment to help prevent the same issue from recurring, but the team didn’t have time to locate and coordinate with a fourth vendor in the middle of winter. Without visibility into real-time asset health, the same exchanger began cracking again near the heat-affected zone. Unaware of the developing damage, the team left the issue unaddressed. The following January, the same failure happened again.
When technology wins and handoffs disappear
Now, let’s run it back with the right TEAM. Through advanced drone inspection technology, the team gained a far more comprehensive understanding of the asset’s condition. Drone-mounted ultrasonic testing sensors measured wall thickness at elevation while the unit remained online, and robotic crawlers assessed vessel internals without scaffolding.
On-stream repair solutions fixed the wed and pressure boundary with zero downtime.
With the same team leading the way, the operator made the intuitive, low-effort decision to heat-treat the asset to reduce the risk of a repeat. Post-weld heat treatment relieved residual stress in the repair zone, preventing cracking in the heat-affected zone. Then, detection confirmed the absence of fugitive emissions before the unit returned to full service.
The real difference-maker? The operator implemented OneInsight to gain real-time insight into asset health, with data pulled directly from the asset into one central location for inspection data, repair records and post-weld heat treatment documentation.
With visible, searchable and actively monitored asset-integrity data, the operator could identify emerging risks before they disrupted operations. As temperatures dropped the following January, the system tracked condition trends and flagged anomalies before they could become failures.
A better January starts this fall
Thermal cycling, freeze events and sustained sub-freezing temperatures turn manageable degradation into emergencies. TEAM’s integrated inspection, detection, repair, heat treating, digital monitoring and advanced asset solutions enable operators to enter the winter months with complete visibility into the condition of every critical asset, its inspection history and its maintenance trajectory.
For more information, visit teaminc.com/services
