TRACK: Safety/Reliability
Maintaining a competitive advantage in emerging and growth markets like minerals, desalination, data centers, semiconductors, specialty chemicals, chlor-alkali, and steel requires plant operators and engineering firms to be educated on modern materials. Corrosive environments demand advanced piping materials to cut lifecycle costs and boost uptime. New piping solutions face hurdles such as lack of testing standards, limited awareness, and knowledge gaps among engineers, especially those focused only on metallic systems. Fluoropolymer-lined engineered structural composite piping will be used as a case study to illustrate how these challenges can be overcome by the manufacturer and the end user to safely switch piping technologies to eliminate corrosion. The case study will cover what the product was designed to accomplish, feedback from users and technical thought leaders, gaps identified in standards, retesting and alteration of the product and/or standards to demonstrate safe operation and failure modes, defining appropriate applications for safe and reliable use, and ensuring the new technology is incorporated into documents like The Chlorine Institute Pamphlet 6, the MTI Lined Piping Guideline, and applicable standards.