Tower internals inspection

[ChemEng84]

I'm a process engineer working for an LNG and we have a stripping tower containing 20 trays, we are facing a disturbance in process regarding the specs of liquid coming out of the tower and one of the possible reasons is tray damage.

We can't shut down the plant and so we need to perform an inspection on all the trays in the tower to check for tray damage.

The tower is made from stainless steel with hot insulation of 50mm thickness.

what are the possible methods for inspecting this tower?

Also one of the ideas is to perform thermograph on this tower to check for the temperature profile of it, but will thermograph work with the hot insulation installed?



Your feed back is highly appreciated.

 

[YBrooman]

Hello there,
Well, a 50mm of thickness should maintain all the heat you need to do the thermal inspection on it.
How tall is your tower? You already considered to cute your insulation to do the test? It will be economic available? If you have an idea of what tray the problem is you could cut just a small piece around it.

The other manner that I see to do this analysis is to simulate a tower with 19 trays (if the problem is in just one of the trays) cutting each tray at time to see if the outlet specs approaches to your specs.

 

[StoneCold]

You might want to do gamma scans on the column. You can google gamma scans and get some good information about scanning columns.

Regards
StoneCold

 

[dcasto]

i've had good luck with tracerco

 

[ash9144]

A thermal scan will work if you pull the insulation or paint the metal black. Thermography works on emissivity so it is impossible to get accurate data through shiny insulation covering.

Gamma scans also work well but are expensive.

Probably depends on your tower size which is more economical.

If you have points flanges on the tower the easiest way would be to get pressure profile of the tower.