Paulo Augusto Martinez - Director, A. Hak Brasil Servico Industriais LTDA
A.Hak Industrial Services was awarded to perform the first UT-inspection and fitness-for-service analysis of a furnace in Brazil. For the project, a new, second-generation Furnace Piglet® tool was used for the intelligent pigging. This new ‘in- house’ developed tool contains fixed transducers and an internal storage module where the raw ultrasonic signal (A-scan data) is stored.
In the inspection report, the data is presented in 2D C-scan and 3D images of the tubes and bends. In this instance, the data presented in the inspection report was used for the calculation of the remaining life of the tubes, which was conducted according to the API-579/ASME FFS standard. This assessment provided evidence-based information for deciding whether or not to replace the tubes during the plant shutdown.
The inspection of furnaces using UT-inspection tools proved to be a reliable, cost-effective and time-efficient technique. This first inspection performed in Brazil establishes a framework for innovation in the methodology of integrity analysis applied to this kind of equipment in Brazilian refineries.