Flange Joint Integrity Management

Background

Usually in the refining chemical plants,the tighting of the heat exchanger pipe flange, as well as restricted space flange, use the air cannons or sledgehammer, the advantages are high speed and labor costs saving, the disadvantage is that the bolt payload is not controllable, the flange parallelism can not be controlled, resulting in a lot of flange leakage in the process of operation.

Case study

In the overhaul installation of oil refining and chemical plants, due to the varying quality of construction personnel, the number of managers and technicians is small, the overhaul period is short, and the installation process of flange joints lacks supervision and quality control, resulting in the risk of leakage after the completion of flange joint assembly.

1, The construction personnel do not have standardized workflow and professional installation knowledge;

2, Managers and technicians do not have a strong sense of management, and there is no uniform implementation standard;

3, The fastening machine is single and few in number, which can't meet the requirement of bolt fixed torque fastening;

4, Process control without supervisors, quality standards can not be put into place.

Our solution

We developed standard operating procedures according to FLANGE JOINT INTEGRITY MANAGEMENT

Personnel training: theoretical and practical training for construction personnel on installation specifications

Supervisors: control technicians according to the installation specifications for quality control of key nodes

Operation plate: Develop bolt fastening process card for bolt specifications and quantity.

Installation tools: according to the site conditions and the number of bolts, select the low clearance hydraulic wrench, four synchronized fastening steps

In accordance with the standardized workflow of flange joints to complete the heat exchanger flange fastening, as well as the restricted space flange fastening, the flange went through the pressure test and air leakage test, which can maintain operation with no leakage.