Session: MF-24-01 Materials and Fabrication for Refining - 1

Paper Number: 105792

105792 - Fire Assessments in Refineries, 20 Years of Api 579 Part 11 Use at Totalenergies 

In refineries, fires can occur and unfortunately have catastrophic consequences (human and material). First consequence of fire is always confusion.

After a fire, it is necessary to assess the damage for repairing and allow restarting.

The API 579 part 11 offers a very pragmatic and efficient approach. This document has been used with success for more than 20 years at TotalEnergies.

The purpose of this paper is to present these practices of incident investigation and associated damage assessment, its limits, its implementation according to different fire types and the organization needed.

First, it’s important to split fire analysis (causes) and damage assessments which are completely different approaches and request not same organization.

Secondly, fire degradations depend often on fire time. For short fire duration (less than 30mns), material degradations (metallic) are often limited.

For long fire duration (more than 3 hours), material degradations are significant.

API 579 part 11 propose starting with establishment of 6 heat exposure zones. For metallic pressure vessels and piping, only the hot zones (4 to 6) are critical and addressed in this paper.

After heat exposure zones established, exhaustive list of affected equipment is necessary for defining dedicated inspection plans. This job is always difficult to be done, due to lack of equipment information (lost, missing, not up to date...).

Then, inspection plan results are used for equipment repair definitions or replacements.

Another important topic is traceability aspect which is also addressed in this paper in order to discuss with all external interlocutors (insurers, regulations, etc.).

Presenting Author: Charles Le Neve TotalEnergies

Presenting Author Biography: Material and Welding engineer
For 30 years at TotalEnergies, half in Refineries

Authors:

Charles Le Neve TotalEnergies