Accendo Reliability

Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site

  • Home
  • About
    • Contributors
  • Reliability.fm
    • Speaking Of Reliability
    • Rooted in Reliability: The Plant Performance Podcast
    • Quality during Design
    • Critical Talks
    • Dare to Know
    • Maintenance Disrupted
    • Metal Conversations
    • The Leadership Connection
    • Practical Reliability Podcast
    • Reliability Matters
    • Reliability it Matters
    • Maintenance Mavericks Podcast
    • Women in Maintenance
    • Accendo Reliability Webinar Series
    • Asset Reliability @ Work
  • Articles
    • CRE Preparation Notes
    • on Leadership & Career
      • Advanced Engineering Culture
      • Engineering Leadership
      • Managing in the 2000s
      • Product Development and Process Improvement
    • on Maintenance Reliability
      • Aasan Asset Management
      • CMMS and Reliability
      • Conscious Asset
      • EAM & CMMS
      • Everyday RCM
      • History of Maintenance Management
      • Life Cycle Asset Management
      • Maintenance and Reliability
      • Maintenance Management
      • Plant Maintenance
      • Process Plant Reliability Engineering
      • ReliabilityXperience
      • RCM Blitz®
      • Rob’s Reliability Project
      • The Intelligent Transformer Blog
    • on Product Reliability
      • Accelerated Reliability
      • Achieving the Benefits of Reliability
      • Apex Ridge
      • Metals Engineering and Product Reliability
      • Musings on Reliability and Maintenance Topics
      • Product Validation
      • Reliability Engineering Insights
      • Reliability in Emerging Technology
    • on Risk & Safety
      • CERM® Risk Insights
      • Equipment Risk and Reliability in Downhole Applications
      • Operational Risk Process Safety
    • on Systems Thinking
      • Communicating with FINESSE
      • The RCA
    • on Tools & Techniques
      • Big Data & Analytics
      • Experimental Design for NPD
      • Innovative Thinking in Reliability and Durability
      • Inside and Beyond HALT
      • Inside FMEA
      • Integral Concepts
      • Learning from Failures
      • Progress in Field Reliability?
      • Reliability Engineering Using Python
      • Reliability Reflections
      • Testing 1 2 3
      • The Manufacturing Academy
  • eBooks
  • Resources
    • Accendo Authors
    • FMEA Resources
    • Feed Forward Publications
    • Openings
    • Books
    • Webinars
    • Journals
    • Higher Education
    • Podcasts
  • Courses
    • 14 Ways to Acquire Reliability Engineering Knowledge
    • Reliability Analysis Methods online course
    • Measurement System Assessment
    • SPC-Process Capability Course
    • Design of Experiments
    • Foundations of RCM online course
    • Quality during Design Journey
    • Reliability Engineering Statistics
    • Quality Engineering Statistics
    • An Introduction to Reliability Engineering
    • An Introduction to Quality Engineering
    • Process Capability Analysis course
    • Root Cause Analysis and the 8D Corrective Action Process course
    • Return on Investment online course
    • CRE Preparation Online Course
    • Quondam Courses
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming Live Events
  • Calendar
    • Call for Papers Listing
    • Upcoming Webinars
    • Webinar Calendar
  • Login
    • Member Home

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

When To Use Stainless And Alloy Steel In Place Of Plastic Or Carbon Steel Items

When To Use Stainless And Alloy Steel In Place Of Plastic Or Carbon Steel Items

When To Use Stainless And Alloy Steel In Place Of Plastic Or Carbon Steel. There are many times when it is false economy to use carbon steel and plastic items. It is often better to use stainless and alloy steels instead. They last longer and deliver a lower life cycle cost.

Keywords: steel tank, steel pipe

The only way to convince people who don’t have their own experience with building and maintaining plant and equipment is to do a life cycle cost analysis and show them the money they will lose if they make poor choices!

Here are some typical situations when it’s usually better to use high quality stainless metals (not less than 316 marine grade stainless steel).

Stainless Steel Tanks

  • If you factor in the cost of first painting a carbon steel storage tank, and then repainting it every 10 to 12 years to protect it against atmospheric and/or chemical vapour corrosion, you could have paid for a stainless steel tank at the start. It’s likely that a stainless tank would never need to be maintained again once it’s installed.Unlike painted carbon steel, you can’t chip a stainless tank wall and start a corrosion cell. Underfloor corrosion on a carbon steel tank is a major risk and many tanks need floors replaced at sometime in their working lives. Provided there is not a chloride problem under a stainless steel tank floor, then underfloor corrosion is not an issue.
  • One important factor with stainless steels and alloy steels is that they have much higher tensile strengths than carbon steels. This means you can use thinner material to make the tank. As a consequence you need less mass of metal and so the costs look more reasonable when compared to a thicker carbon steel tank that you have to paint and maintain.The next time you need to build a carbon steel tank also do the design and cost calculations to make it out of stainless steel (or alloy steel in corrosive environments). Compare the life time costs – you will be surprised at how sensible it could be to go with stainless or alloy steel instead of painted carbon steel.

Stainless Steel Pipe

  • Here too if you factor in the cost to replace and repaint corroded piping over the life of the plant you will probably find stainless piping is cheaper my quite a margin.
  • One other place to consider using stainless instead of plastic is for instrumentation sensing lines and air-actuated valve connections. Plastic piping is easily damaged, cut, burnt by weld splatter, driven over, pierced, snagged and made unusable by atmospheric contaminants. Stainless steel (or maybe even copper) tubing is often a better life-time choice.

Stainless Steel For Cable Ties; Pipeline And Electrical Conduit Wall Mounting Clamps

  • In the Australia sun ultraviolet-protected plastic electric cable ties last about 5 years. Then they perish and break. The cables fall off the walls and from bracketing. It’s a waste of time and costs unnecessary money putting the cabling back up again.Back in 1999 I ask my electrical maintenance people to come up with an alternate way to tie-up electric cabling that would last at least 20 years without maintenance. They chose stainless steel bandit strapping with stainless crimps. They don’t use plastic cable ties in outside locations any more because they failed so quickly.
  • Using galvanised wall mounting clamps for piping and electrical conduits in corrosive environments is a waste of money. It usually better to use stainless steel (or for very corrosive locations get special clamps made from alloy steel) than to replace corroded galvanised wall clamps every three to five years for the next 40 years of a production plant’s life.

Stainless Structural Steel Frames

  • If you use mobile equipment, like pumps, mounted on transportable frames in corrosive chemical environments, it’s probably more cost effective to make all the metal mounting structure from stainless steel. It’ll last longer and look better than painted carbon steel will after a couple of months of service.
  • You often see the lower portion of structural steel members corroding if they stand in wet and/or corrosive environments. If corrosion will destroy the support feet and lower portions of a structure it may be more cost effective to make the lower portions of non-corroding metals.

Disclaimer: Because the authors, publisher and resellers do not know the context in which the information presented in this article is to be used they accept no responsibility for the consequences of using the information contained or implied in any articles.

P.S. If you have maintenance engineering advice on industrial equipment maintenance, especially defect elimination and failure prevention of plant and equipment, or have made successful equipment reliability improvements, please feel free to send me your articles to post on this website. You can contact me by email at info@lifetime-reliability.com

Filed Under: Articles, on Maintenance Reliability, Plant Maintenance

« How Do the Goals of Reliability and Quality Engineers Align?
How to Create Project Performance Curves »

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Article by
Mike Sondalini
in the
Plant Maintenance series articles provided courtesy of Feed Forward Publications and Lifetime Reliability Solutions.

Join Accendo

Receive information and updates about articles and many other resources offered by Accendo Reliability by becoming a member.

It’s free and only takes a minute.

Join Today

Recent Articles

  • Risk Prioritization in FMEA – a Summary
  • What Are Best Practices for Facilitating Qualitative Assessments?
  • So, What’s Still Wrong with Maintenance
  • Foundation of Great Project Outcomes – Structures
  • What is the Difference Between Quality Assurance and Quality Control?

© 2023 FMS Reliability · Privacy Policy · Terms of Service · Cookies Policy

This site uses cookies to give you a better experience, analyze site traffic, and gain insight to products or offers that may interest you. By continuing, you consent to the use of cookies. Learn how we use cookies, how they work, and how to set your browser preferences by reading our Cookies Policy.