Time-to-Failure Forecast for Corroded Shell of Above-Ground Steel Tank Used to Store Liquid Fuels

An original simplified procedure to estimate the remaining service time of corroded shell of an on-the-ground steel tank used to store liquid fuels is presented in this paper. Current corrosion progress trend, identified a’posteriori based on the obligatory technical condition monitoring, is extrapolated to the future tank service time under the assumption that the conditions of service would not change and no renovation or modernization works would be undertaken. Failure probability understood as exhaustion of the capability to safely resist the loads applied due to the corrosion progress constitutes the measure of the sought uptime. For comparative purposes several effective inference methods have been proposed for the same input data, based on formally qualitatively different but corresponding description measures. It has been shown, that in the analysis of this type the representative values, usually expressed as quantiles of probability distributions describing random variables in use, need not be specified to verify the safety condition. The proposed algorithm is based on fully probabilistic considerations, and those, according to Authors’ opinion, by their nature lead to more reliable, and at the same time, objective estimates.