Real Time Mechanical Integrity for Pressure Vessels and Other Critical Assets

Abstract

There is a wall today in plant operations, maintenance, and reliability, where the integrity of assets is of critical importance to the health, safety, environmental and financial performance of plant operations. In many cases, the integrity of assets is only partially known, is informed by overly conservative assumptions or follows rules that have been established as part of historical approaches. The mechanical health of critical pressure vessels, piping and other assets is limited by the fidelity and model size of its finite element simulation. Operators must choose between speed, accuracy, and quality in setting up an asset health integrity system and legacy approaches provide partial answers at best and/or workflows that are not well suited for asset health integrity systems. Industry has relied on finite element analysis to determine structural integrity during design, but new advances in numerical reduction methods and computational advances have been combined to dramatically decrease the time needed to solve high fidelity whole-asset structural simulations to visualize stress fields, accumulated fatigue life, and other structural/mechanical analysis in real-time. This paper will address this problem through the lens of two real-world pressure vessels, demonstrate the limitations of legacy approaches, and discuss the benefits of running structural simulations in real time.