Material Selection

Material selection plays a vital role in any application, since any damage to piping and equipment material result in wall loss, leak or loss of primary containment. Hence, material selection is very important to achieve desire service life of the asset and shall consider all active and potential damage mechanism that will occur during operation/service, to reduce asset downtime. Material selection for any asset shall be optimized considering the life cycle cost. Any material selected for an asset shall serve as per acceptable safety, integrity and reliability. With our extensive theoretical knowledge and appreciable practical experience in this field, Material Selection for assets in Oil & Gas sector involve following minimum considerations:

• Design details,
• Corrosive environments in oil and gas production facilities (operating condition & corrodents),
• Corrosion assessments (identifying right damage mechanism, including corrosion rate prediction using software),
• Erosion/Erosion-Corrosion evaluations (including erosion rate estimation),
• Evaluation of use of Carbon Steel vs Corrosion Resistant Alloys (CRAs),
• Impact of likely and possible changes to operating conditions,
• Long-term performance of various materials to different corrosion mitigation methods,
• Evaluation of failure probabilities, failure modes, criticalities and consequences,
• International standards, specifications and recommended practices pertaining to material selection,
• For main systems where materials/fabrication represent significant investments and/or operational costs, a life cycle cost analysis shall be the basis for material selection.