Meeting the requirements in a corrosive chemical environment

As her father owned an engineering company, Kerry was introduced to the engineering world at a young age so it is no wonder that she enjoys every aspect of her job, including working with clients, her coworkers, and her overall daily tasks. Her day is routinely similar, beginning at 6am when she is given a set of piping engineering deliverables. With a few junior engineers working with her, Kerry is very much in a leader position.

She elaborates that working with junior engineers is refreshing, as they are very enthusiastic and she enjoys mentoring and training people. Kerry says that the company she works for is doing a lot of workshare, with the project being split between four different offices: Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Mumbai, India; Vadodara, India; and the Houston, Texas office. “It is being divided by area.

We are doing stress analysis and that is being done in our Indian office and the design is also being done in our Indian office. The key to success is working as a team, working together, checking each other’s work, and supporting each other. It does take a little longer because you have to consult and get everyone’s opinion. That is the hard part. Also, I find it challenging because there are different cultures and language differences.”

Working with exotic metals

Specifically, Kerry highlights how exciting it is to work with some of the exotic metals that aren’t as common in the offshore industry. “We have got a lot of duplex, tantalum, titanium and we even have hastalloy. We also have a lot of rubber-lined materials because what we are using is a very corrosive chemical, a pesticide, which is very interesting.”

Kerry further explains that because these materials she is working with are so expensive, such as duplex and titanium, she has been looking at purchasing commodities like valves in a more cost effective manner. This is to ensure the quotes she is given meet the requirements. She adds that while researching more affordable methods, her team has discovered that with C22 alloys it is more economical to get a casting than a forging.

“Forgings take longer than castings do. However, with castings you have additional testing to do because castings are prone to cracking. Therefore, we have to watch them carefully, especially in highly corrosive environments such as a chemical facility.”

For example, she explains that her team has worked with one specific valve that is over 12 inches in size and costs USD $5 million. Due to this high expense, Kerry’s team cannot afford to make any errors. In addition, not only are the exotic metals expensive to buy, there are also longer lead times associated with them sometimes taking the upwards of 54 weeks. 

“It can actually be difficult to get some of the materials, therefore we had looked at cladding and lining. We have found that in Europe no one clads anything from four inches and down, but four inches and above you can find people to clad for you. We looked at taking stainless steel and titanium and cladding them, which is often what is done on vessels.”.

Chemical applications

When asked about chemical applications versus oil & gas applications, Kerry discusses the effects of the market. She explains that due to the fact that the oil and gas industry is so non-buoyant at the moment, the chemical market is picking up. A lot of people in the chemical industry are investing while the prices are low. Kerry does admit that she finds it is a big difference jumping from oil and gas offshore projects to chemical ones because even though the principles are the same, the schedule is much faster paced.

“The materials and services are a lot different but I find it very interesting to be able to better understand the soft seated materials used for valves. In oil & gas we would use carbon steel, stainless steel, or duplex, but on the chemical side we tend to use a lot of corrosive materials like tantalum, Hastelloys, alloy 20. There is some carbon steel that we use in utilities, but the rest is all exotic.”