Root cause of failure of fire tubes used in the oil dehydration process

The fire tubes are components used in extraction and processing plants of crude, specifically in the gun barrel, where the separation of the water and the oil is carried out through a gravitational process. These tubes are responsible to increase the temperature in the gun barrel. Once the tubes failed, the root cause of failure was determined through the fractography, material and operating conditions analysis; additionally recommendations were made in order to increase their durability and guarantee their availability for the operation of the plant.

The root cause analysis of the fire tubes failure afforded to our customer the following benefits:

• Knowledge about the operating conditions that generates de failure of the fire tubes.
• Mitigate alternatives to avoiding future failures.
• Alternative materials and coating processes to improve the durability of the fire tubes and, at the same time, to reduce the frequency of the corrective maintenance stops as well as the buying of spare parts.