Did you know that by investing in a couple of days training for your maintenance/reliability department, your existing vibration analysts who already routinely perform condition monitoring on rotating machinery could be using exactly the same instrumentation to perform vital risk assessment surveys on business and safety critical static plant such as pipelines and associated small bore connections (SBCs), which account for the majority of failures.
It seems that not all maintenance engineers and managers realize that exactly the same machinery CM principles can be applied to supposedly static plant such as pipework, which is known to commonly suffer from unwanted vibration issues for example due to mechanical excitation, pressure pulsations or flow induced vibrations etc. where many serious pipe vibration issues can be easily detected using a simple vibration screening technique like that used for the routine condition monitoring of rotating machinery.
The problem engineers face is knowing how much vibration is acceptable and what level of vibration would become so damaging that it could lead to a high risk of fatigue cracking, resulting in imminent rupture of the pipe welds.
If undetected, excessive vibration can result in fatigue cracks at welds resulting in pipe fracture. In the oil & gas and chemical process industries dealing with hazardous liquids or gases (e.g. COMAH sites) such fractures could lead to serious incidents involving major injury, fire, explosion or pollution.
Whereas for rotating machines, typically vibration limits may be taken form standards such as the vibration severity guidelines presented in ISO 10816 depending on the machine type. However for pipework vibration limits, presented in the industry best practice guidance document from the Energy Institute, define two clear limits, ‘Concern’ and ‘Problem’. These are broadly analogous to the warning and alarm levels for machines.
If you would like to learn more about how to adopt best practice to reduce the risk of fatigue failures on your pipework and how to implement common corrective actions, then you may be interested in one of the 5 pipework vibration courses run by specialist training provider VibTech Ltd.