Question:
Planned turnaround or shutdown of plants or facilities is a major source of planned downtimes which should be optimised. How long is the turnaround/shutdown interval in your plant/facility? What are the constraints and strategies for extending the turnaround interval and reducing the turnaround duration?

Choices:
9-10 years
7-8 years
5-6 years
3-4 years
1-2 years

 

2 major constraints to extending our turnaround interval are:

1) statutory regulations which give permit for pressure vessels for first 15 consecutive months plus extensions which need to be requested extension by extension. Does this requirement exist in other parts of the world?

2) catalyst life up to 4 years after which its activity goes below 80%. Does this condition apply to refineries?

We are Still thinking of the strategies to extend to 5 years. TQ

Why many views but few votes? TQ

quote:

statutory regulations which give permit for pressure vessels for first 15 consecutive months

What kind of pressure vessel? A boiler? Our boilers are inspected every 2 years by the government, but that is not a turnaround, we consider it part regular periodic preventive maintenance.

Josh you didn't define your target. Now we know your case is a refinery, but what are the products, how many units, can it be a partial shutdown or must the whole plant go off-line? What are the market expectations. We postponed our turnaround with one year because of the strike in Venezuela.

Turnaround are complex situations and the current state of the plant will determine when it is time.

I'm refering to total product cutoff for turnaround. Does your boiler inspection by government causes product cutoff ie plant shutdown in order to be carried out or you have standby running? TQ

Of course we have back-up, a boiler is a pressure vessel, just like a vacuum colomn, but the government can't come in and say:

"Shutdown the circus because we need to look if your trays are in good shape"

Our two year certification will expire in two months, and we already are preparing for the governmental boiler inspection.

If there are other question concerning process vessels and drums we always have our inspection/maintenance records from Turnarounds and Maintenance activities ready.
The ones who ask for this are Auditers and insurance agents.

The product cutoff due to boiler inspection is the downtime we try to minimize by extending the COF (Certificate Of Fitness) up to 48 months via remnant life study (based on replica test) and/or RBI to know the degradation mechsnism which affects the boiler's fitness for use. In our case, the boiler 140 bar max design pressure is integrated with the main process, not a separate package boiler so cannot be shutdown for internal inspection without production loss. Maybe in some cases, standby boilers are available so can stagger their inspections to keep the plant running continuously and thus presents less challenges to the plant personnel. Any ideas how to extend the COF for upt to 7 years or so? TQ

140 bar design pressure, what is your working pressure? For a boiler this would fall in the high pressure range (power generation).

Is it a boiler or a steam generator? You said integrated in the process.

We got two "laundry" boilers according to the operators, and two steam generators in the units, but that doesn't mean it is less challenging to plant personnel.

Challenging is to convince operations that you need time to do PM. You loose one bolt, and they have already nightmares of plant-shutdown.

If it is a mere steam generator (no furnace) I would threat it like the other refining installations.
We had our first turnaround in 2000 (3 years operation), and the second in 2004. Some minor outages for decoking (once a year).

How many turnarounds have your plant suffered, what were the findings?