To address the problem of fatigue failures of internal heat exchangers in a large industrial pressure vessel, a 6D engineer worked with an international engineering team to develop a measurement and analysis strategy that evaluated the fitness-for-purpose of the current system under operating loads.
The vessel system was instrumented, and critical load path strain responses to operating conditions were measured. The fitness-for-purpose evaluation showed very high levels of fatigue damage during normal operations and a short remaining fatigue life.
After this evaluation, the client was able to initiate a redesign process before the system failed, using the measured loads as a baseline. The heavily damaged system was replaced during a controlled outage, minimizing disruption to the production schedule.
Benefit:
Instead of reacting to a catastrophic failure, the customer was able to plan for system replacement.