Treatment and Performance Management for Cooling Waters

August 19, 2019

Author: E. S. Beardwood. NACE Corrosion 2011, Paper No. 11388, NACE International, Publications Division, 1440 South Creek Drive, Houston, Texas, 77084, USA. www.nace.org.

ABSTRACT:  The global economy has focused a shift in emphasis from preventative maintenance to risk based maintenance with the expectations of extending the time between scheduled outages such as turnarounds, while also moving towards longer duration between unscheduled downtime in an effort to increase today’s profitability.  Utilization of an ROI-based evaluation to schedule maintenance compared to offset in production throughput at times have been wise decisions and at other times not so wise. As the decisions are one of risk versus reward, an organization may at some point be confronted with an unscheduled outage in the wake of a decision made well in the past that negatively impacts profitability today or in the future. Clearly, there had been ether confusion or a misunderstanding in regard to the complexities associated with both the risks and rewards. This paper will discuss the best practices associated with the water treatment and performance management of cooling waters on a holistic basis. This will allow for better definition of the risks in order to ensure the reliability required to obtain the rewards sought by management. Cooling system design compared to actual operational conditions may not approach best practice; hence predictions using modeling to identify potential areas of susceptible to failure and then monitoring techniques to predict the health and performance of said cooling system unit operations are outlined to assist in defining the risks and rewards. Case histories are also provided.