Oil & Gas

Chemical and petrochemical industries share common challenges with other industries regarding the use of materials and the maintenance of industrial components, structures and facilities.

However, both industries have an essential particularity, consisting in the extraordinarily demanding conditions to which materials are subjected, because of the type of products and environments they operate.

Corrosion processes are almost unavoidable, so that this type of process and their corresponding consequences have to be controlled through adequate materials selection, inspection programmes, and the definition of acceptance/rejection criteria of in-service components.

Corrosion analysis

Inesco Ingenieros performs all types of analysis related to corrosion processes, from the analysis of local thin areas caused by generalised corrosion to stress corrosion cracking processes. These assessments are carried out using the most widespread procedures in the sector (API, ASME, FITNET FFS…), which allows us to perform a wide variety of analyses related to the determination of safety conditions for in-service components, the definition of safety margins and inspection intervals, crack propagation predictions or failure analysis of any kind of components.

Fracture and fatigue assessments

Inesco Ingenieros has broad, fruitful experience in fracture and fatigue assessments of industrial components, as well as in the interaction between these phenomena and the typical environments existing in chemical and petrochemical industries (e.g., corrosion-fatigue).

These analyses are possible due to the high level of expertise of Inesco Ingenieros, its multidisciplinary teams, and the use of advanced analysis technologies that range from finite element simulations to the use of the most relevant assessment procedures in this field (BS7910, FITNET FFS, R6, API 579,…)

Structural analysis and finite elements simulation

Chemical and petrochemical industrial facilities constitute complex structural systems whose safety and integrity have to be ensured.

With this purpose, Inesco Ingenieros offers these industries its capacities in structural and stress analysis.

Stress fields in elbows, tees and nozzles, or acting loads and moments on feeding are some examples in which Inesco Ingenieros has applied its expertise to solve the challenges of our clients.

Fluid modelling and fluid-structure interaction

The simulation of fluid and fluid mixture behaviour and the corresponding fluid-structure interaction is a service which is in ever greater demand in order to obtain highly accurate stress analysis and/or to the physical understanding of fluid dynamics phenomena (e.g., vortex in pipeline joints, thermal stratification…).

Because of the implicit high conservatism of many thermomechanical simulations, on some occasions it is necessary to define more accurately the actual state of a structure containing fluids.

Over the last years, Inesco Ingenieros has specialised in this type of simulations, and has actively worked on simulations for chemical and petrochemical plants.