4 Signs Your Pressure Vessel Requires Urgent Replacement

March 8, 2023

Numerous industrial buildings take advantage of equipment pieces, machines, and others in optimising their daily operations. One of the things they utilise is a pressure vessel.

Pressure vessels are containers that can contain high-pressure liquids or gases without expecting any damage to the properties. For industrial purposes, these containers can work well with distillation towers, hydraulic reservoirs, and components related to the containment of liquified gases. They can also be integrated with equipment pieces and tools found in oil and gas, chemical, petrochemical, and energy industrial plants.

Common Types of Pressure Vessels

Many types of pressure vessels can be maximised by industries. These include heat exchangers, storage vessels, boilers, flash drums, and separators.

Heat exchangers are pressure vessels that can transport heat between two or more fluids. Their operations often depend on the thermal and flow properties of the fluids as well as the thermal property of the conductive partition. The materials being transported by heat exchangers may experience stress from the temperature difference between fluids and their internal pressure. 

Storage vessels, alternatively, can temporarily hold liquids, gases, and vapours before they are processed into various products. They can also store finished products like compressed natural gas and liquid nitrogen. Boilers, on the other hand, use fuel, nuclear, or electrical power as their heat source. They allow the transfer of heat from their source to the fluid, making them effective in heating liquids. 

Process vessels, ultimately, are vessels where industrial processes occur. These processes include mixing, agitation, distillation, mass separation, decantation, and chemical reaction.

Pressure Vessels Need Replacement

As mentioned earlier, pressure vessels are containers that can hold and retain liquids, gases, and vapours at a pressure significantly lower or higher than the ambient pressure. Since pressure vessels deal with delicate elements, they should only be operated by qualified personnel. Failure to handle them correctly will only result in the accidental release or leakage of their content, posing threat to the surroundings of the industrial plants or buildings.

Some pressure vessels, unfortunately, may need to be replaced right away once they manifest the following signs:

1. Reduced pressure: The pressure inside the vessels should always be maintained at optimal levels. Once their pressure has reduced significantly even at normal operations, then they should be serviced or replaced immediately.
2. Unstable pressure: As the pump cycles on and off, the pressure vessels should retain their pressure at a stable level. Once the pressure becomes unstable during the pump cycling process, these equipment pieces must be replaced right away.
3. Leaks: Pressure vessels should always hold their content throughout their service life. If some of the content, however, have leaked, then it should be checked by experts as soon as possible. A replacement may be needed if the leaks are difficult to resolve.
4. Corrosion: The materials used to fabricate pressure vessels are often durable enough to withstand surrounding elements. But if their external surfaces start to corrode, they might have to be replaced at once.

If you need some help with your pressure vessels, you can contact us at Fusion-Weld Engineering. We satisfy the increasing demand for quality pressure vessels, shell and tube heat exchangers, specialised fabrications and modular skid-mounted chemical process plants.

Contact Details

Fusion - Weld Engineering Pty Ltd
ABN 98 068 987619

1865 Frankston Flinders Road,
Hastings, VIC 3915

Ph: (03) 5909 8218

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