New hibernation systems for corrosion protection of internal substrate surfaces of chemical processing plants

• E. Lyublinski¹, Y. Vaks¹, W. Rohland¹, T. Natale¹, S. Woessner¹, R. Singh², E. Tanabe² and M. Schultz³

¹ Northern Technologies International Corporation, 23205 Mercantile Rd., Beachwood, OH 44122, USA
² Zerust, 255, São Bernardo Do Campo Avenue, Sorocaba 18085, São Paulo, Brazil
³ Petrobras, República do Chile Av., Nr. 65, Rio de Janeiro – RJ, CEP: 20031-912, Brazil

Abstract: Corrosion protection of large equipment’s internal surfaces (distillation towers, pipelines, tanks, boilers, heat exchangers, etc.) during storage, transportation/shipping and long term mothballing (up to 10 years) is a worldwide problem. In many cases, well-known technology for replacement of the environment with nitrogen gases cannot be applied and are not always efficient enough. In addition to their limited protection ability, these approaches tend to be cumbersome, complicated, labor intensive, very expensive and create safety issues. This paper describes a system that reduces the environment corrosiveness by decreasing the relative humidity (RH) to a level that allows achieving corrosion protection of different metals in any sealed enclosures. In addition this new system delivers the volatile corrosion inhibitors (VCI) into enclosures that increases the corrosion protection efficiency and decreases the corrosion if the enclosures have some leakage. This system creates the required RH and concentration of VCI very fast. It is compact equipment and can be moved for applying corrosion protection in different locations. In the paper, we will present a mobile system that can be periodically used for many kinds of equipment in different facilities. A real system, designed, manufactured and applied for corrosion protection of mothballing equipment in one refinery will be presented and discussed.

Keywords: environment, corrosion, protection, inhibitor, dehumidification, equipment, enclosures, mothballing, storage, transportation

Int. J. Corros. Scale Inhib., 2015, 4, no. 3, 197-209 PDF (2 220 K)
doi: 10.17675/2305-6894-2015-4-3-197-209

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