High Temperature Hydrogen Attack 4

[metengr]

Here is a report that was recently issued concerning the Fatal Accident at Tesoro Anacortes Refinery, located in the State of Washington.

Interesting reading;

http://www.tsocorp.com/stellent/groups/corpcomm/documents/gt_contribution/001347.pdf

 

[SnTMan]

metengr, very interesting, thanks on behalf of all.

 

[gearcutter]

Thanks for link metengr.
A star for you.

Ron Volmershausen
Brunkerville Engineering
Newcastle Australia

http://www.aussieweb.com.au/email.aspx?id=1194181

 

[arunmrao]

Thanks metengr for sharing the article with us.

_____________________________________
"It's better to die standing than live your whole life on the knees" by Peter Mayle in his book A Good Year

 

[Guest102023]

Thanks metengr, at first glance it appears to be a high quality report on what seems like a very thorough investigation.

 

[blacksmith37]

Thanks, brings back old times.
About the time of the original design there was concern about the Nelson curve for C: 1/2 Mo, Amoco and Exxon (Cuifredda must have gotten samples from half of their vessels) found attack in the "safe" zone. Although much later , it seems the Shell review (1999 ?) concentrated on C: 1/2 Mo, and didn't give the carbon steel enough attention.
Attack always starts in the HAZ (regardless of PWHT) and if you have to check a lot of area, macro etching (hot HCl) brings it out.

 

[sk10009]

Metenger, Thank you so much

 

[unclesyd]

Appreciate the link to the report.

Talking point;
One thing that about the failure is the amount of distortion of
the shell. All the failures from HTHA I've seen had very little
distortion at the failure size, The only failure that unzipped
the vessel along the welds and HAZ was one that was caused
by an internal explosion. HTHA was confirmed a long the
fracture surface.


blacksmith37,

I'm sure that Shell took HTHA as a possibility based on the
1950/1954 "Shell Corrosion Data Survey" by Nelson, "The Red
Book" which had some curves on the potential for H2 damage
in several steels. My boss at the time almost paranoid about
H2. He was always on the phone with someone at Shell
Development. I assume this was Nelson at Shell. Our site had
two H2 plants and 3 processes that used H2 with 2 of them
skirting the potential fro H2 damage.

http://books.google.com/books/about/Corrosion_data_survey.

html?id=u-1WAAAAMAAJ

 

[MJCronin]

metengr....

Why is this a seperate report issued by an authority that is NOT the CSB ? The CSB has been investigating this accident for over a year.

It seems that the CSB has issued other reports on refinery accidents involving materials selection and applications errors.

Why is this one different ?

http://www.csb.gov/investigations/detail.aspx?SID=94&Type=1&pg=1&F_All=y

-MJC

 

[metengr]

I don't have an answer. Regarding the CSB, I have reviewed their past reports and they are not provided in timely fashion.

 

[blacksmith37]

I expect HTHA failures to be a small leak or to be discovered during a specofic inspection (likely based on HTHA found at a similar location). The most catastrophic HTHA failure I saw occured at ambient temp with N pressure , while on start-up : While at operating temp the material had enough toughness to resist a giant crack, but at 70F it was below the brittle transition (built long before fracture toughness was invented).
When I met George Nelson ( about 1967), my impression is that he was retired ,or nearly retired (and making a social call on Dr Sammans at Amoco). My thoughts are many experienced people from Shell Westhollow were retired by 1999 (Tuttle, Treaseder,Kochera, and Mack-in Hague); so how expert of a review did it get ?

 

[MJCronin]

met....

Long delays, yes......but, I do not believe that we will see any more accident reports coming from

http://www.csb.gov

You can count on the CSB, the FDA, FEMA and several other useful and important government agencies to be pushed into oblivian when the next group of Republicans sweep into congress in 2012.

Is the federal government wasteful....yes.

Lets just see where the cuts will take place

 

[blacksmith37]

I would be frustrated working today (I retired many years ago) by the government interference. I did a lot of failure analysis and subbmitted reports to OSHA and preserved evidence; but we pretty much worked with a free hand. The only instruction I got from management was ;"find out what happened".
I remember a "guberment" official giving a speech to welcome himself to the ASTM A1 committee. It had about 300 active members so there were a few new faces at each meeting, but that is the only such speech I heard.

 

[emxhps06]

I have heard a case where an industrial boiler water wall tubes failed by HTHA but the primarily cause was directly due to on-loading corrosion. This happened during winter and the flow was below its recommended limit.