Case Studies of Corrosion Failures in Oil Refineries

Abstract This paper describes three corrosion case histories caused by overconfidence and lack of thorough understanding of the corroding systems. The first case history is exchanger tube failure from excessive high temperature sulfidation caused by changes of operation condition, run length and cleaning interval. The second case is about presumably hydrogen induced cracking(HIC) and high temperature hydrogen attack(HTHA) during weld repair and heat treatment in wet sour service. Inappropriate mixing of process streams was the cause of failure discussed in the third case history.