Failure Investigations

 :

Failure Investigations

When failures occur in mechanical production equipment, such as boilers, heat exchangers, piping, hoists and gear boxes, it is critical to quickly identify the causes and the appropriate actions to be taken. Correct measures can often provide a significant minimization of the outage and further losses for you, the plant owner. The issues behind a failure are however often severely complex and the real causes of the failure can be a challenge to identify.

Systematic and multidisciplinary failure investigations can therefore provide crucial understanding of the causes of failure and the potential impact on structural integrity, safety and residual life as well as possible implications for similar equipment that is in operation.

A specific group at Inspecta has more than 30 years experience in failure assessments in the energy and process industries. Each year, the group investigates a large number of failures in components and systems. The group includes leading specialists representing the entire spectrum of skills needed to make an overall assessment of failure causes, and to provide recommended further action. Necessary specialist skills areas are; materials science; degradation mechanisms such as corrosion, creep, fatigue; welding technology; strength and structural analysis; nondestructive and destructive testing methods and risk analysis based methods.

Inspecta has, for support, a fully equipped materials laboratory and we can perform non-destructive tests with most existing established methods. All the skills mentioned above, combined along with a deep understanding of how plants are operated, forms the necessary basis for the investigation group to be able to draw relevant conclusions and recommendations.

A failure investigation carried out by Inspecta provides the right means for plant owners to decide on effective measures.

Benefits

  • Provides knowledge about the real causes of equipment or component failure
  • Provides recommendations for further action after a failure
  • Finds the right measures to minimize downtime and consequential losses
  • Helps to avoid recurrence of similar failures in the future 
Page created: 06 Apr 2011
Print This Page
Choose country: