MISTRAS’ Engineering Consulting services specialize in design, evaluation, engineering, and analysis of assets and facilities to maximize efficiency, production, and safety while minimizing risk and waste.
Our engineering consulting services are designed to support facilities in the main areas:
Profit Improvement
Our engineering teams are dedicated not only to making sure your operations are safe, but to keeping them running full steam ahead at all times, through operations, reliability, and facility design support.
Operations Support
Our experienced technical staff offer professional support to augment your on-site facility operating personnel during peak work or problem periods, with rapid mobilization and response time.
- Process monitoring and evaluation
- Debottlenecking
- Troubleshooting
- Performance optimization
- Benchmarking
- Control system improvements
- Pre-commissioning, commissioning, and startup assistance
- Operating guidelines
- Performance test procedures
- Process documentation
- Operator and technical staff training
Energy Management
Energy consumption makes up about 30-50% of a refinery’s operating costs, so MISTRAS provides engineering consulting services to help our clients focus on a few major opportunity areas to optimize this spending. Our plan is broken down into four major steps:
- Scope: This first step sets the stage by quantifying expected results, and then defining the scope, objectives, boundaries, plans and schedule for the next steps.
- Assess: Identification and sharing of best practices and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). MISTRAS engineers will help clients focus attention on areas that present the greatest opportunities for optimization. These usually include improving the operating efficiency of fired heaters, distillation units, and steam systems, along with maximizing heat usage.
- Plan: MISTRAS engineers assist in the preparation of a high-yield implementation plan, based on the opportunities identified in the Assessment step. We’ll help set priorities by benchmarking expected savings against industry standards.
- Implement: We’ll support plant management in jointly developing performance metrics, targets, and milestones against which to gauge the plan’s progress and effectiveness.
Plant Equipment Support
MISTRAS provides engineering support for any process equipment or facility, including support clients in the oil & gas and manufacturing industries to maximize the productivity and safety of their FCCUs, cokers, pressure vessels, heat exchangers, storage tanks, piping, marine terminals, and much more.
MISTRAS provides services for a wide range of engineering disciplines, including but not limited to:
- Civil
- Corrosion
- Electric Power
- Instrumentation & Controls
- Machinery/Rotating Equipment
- Materials Selection & Quality
- Mechanical
Fitness-for-Service (FFS) Assessments
Fitness-for-Service (FFS) assessments are quantitative engineering evaluations that MISTRAS performs to determine if an asset is fit for continued service, as part of run-repair-replace decisions. We often perform these to gauge the structural integrity of an in-service component that may contain a flaw or damage. We utilize experimental strain gauging, fracture mechanics and finite element analysis in order to aid us in our FFS calculations.
Assets that have been in operation for long periods of time benefit from FFS assessments to check for life expectancy. An FFS assessment can be used to make run-repair-replace decisions to help determine if pressurized equipment containing flaws can continue to operate safely and if so, how long. These FFS assessments are recognized and referenced by the API Codes and Standards (i.e., 510, 570 & 653) and by National Board-23.
Because engineering works in combination with our inspection services, mechanical integrity (MI), risk-based inspections (RBI), and PCMS, our FFS assessments use methodologies that are equipment-specific, helping to assess and determine an asset's expected lifecycle.
Click here to learn more about Fitness-for-Service (FFS) Assessments.
Fixed Equipment Mechanical Engineering Services
Our experts provides fixed equipment mechanical engineering consultations for a variety of applications:
- Pressure equipment re-rates
- Alterations or repairs
- Surface replication assessments
- Failure and fatigue analysis
- Heater tube remaining life assessment
- Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM)
- XRD analysis
- Engineering of non-pressurized assets, and assessment of non-coded vessels.
Project Planning & Execution
MISTRAS’ engineering SMEs provide services to help our clients manage their engineering and construction projects, including planning for overall project execution and supporting plant start-up.
Our capital project services include:
- Preparation and/or review of the refinery inputs to process licensors
- Material and technology selection assistance and reviews
- Retained equipment and piping serviceability reviews
- Welding standards development and Welding Procedure Specification (WPS) reviews
- Participation in the kick-off meeting with the licensor/engineering contractor
- Equipment design and asset design standards reviews (mid-point & final)
- Hazard and Operability (HAZOP)
- Preparation and/or review of operating guides
- Review of the operating manuals
- Start-up assistance
- Performance and/or guarantee test participation
- Third party fabrication shop inspection and metallurgical/welding engineering support
- Project field execution technical support – variance resolution, field execution instructions, and more
- Coatings and refractory standards development
In addition to capital construction projects, we also support clients in designing and implementing Asset Integrity Management (AIMS) and Mechanical Integrity (MI) programs. Read more about our AIMS/MI program services here.
Refinery Turnaround Optimization
Turnarounds result in some of the biggest maintenance costs that refineries can face, when you consider the lost productivity that comes with shutting down a plant’s operations. MISTRAS provides refinery turnaround planning services to minimize plant downtime and optimize the opportunities that the shutdown can offer. We plan turnarounds in accordance with API codes, along with any other applicable regulations.
Our engineering consultants assess existing turnaround process and maintenance effectiveness through KPIs and performance comparisons against industry-best practices. We help plants identify the major work items and establish turnaround objectives.
Using a risk-based methodology, we help plants establish the scope of the turnaround by defining each of the required maintenance items, setting cost and run length expectations, and reviewing turnaround plans to ensure work is completed as safely and efficiently as possible.
Benefits of MISTRAS’ turnaround planning engineering services include:
- Prioritization of high-risk assets
- Potential to reduce equipment scope resulting in significant cost savings
- Minimize at‐height access spend dramatically
- Mitigate future damage potential using failure analysis
- Optimize inspection and maintenance spending
- Increased mechanical reliability based on anticipating damage mechanism and prescribing appropriate advanced NDT technique
Non-Intrusive Inspection (NII)
Our engineering consulting services help customers implement and execute non-intrusive inspection (NII) programs to safely inspect assets with no entry required.
Learn more about our Non-Intrusive Inspection services.
Non-Process Consulting
Non-process consulting guides the execution of projects for new facilities, plant modifications, and ongoing operations for non-process disciplines.
MISTRAS Engineering Services' non-process consulting is unique in several ways. First, in the outstanding quality of the services we provide, including those for:
- Piping systems
- Pressure vessels
- Heat exchangers
- Fired equipment
- Storage tanks
Second, we do this for all of the principal non-process disciplines associated with facilities used in the process and energy-related industries. The execution of projects is greatly benefited from the dedicated non-process consulting MISTRAS provides.
We have the full scope of OneSource capabilities and experience required in the engineering disciplines for non-process technologies:
- Mechanical
- Piping
- Pressure vessels
- Heat exchangers
- Tankage
- Engineering Materials
- Metallics
- Non-metallics
- Welding and fabrication
- Refractory linings
- Cathodic protection
- Paints and coating
- Environmental
- Combustion emissions
- Incineration systems
- Wastewater management
- Instrumentation/Controls
- Field instruments
- Distributed process control systems
- Machinery
- Compressors
- Pumps
- Steam/gas turbines
- Heat Transfer
- Fired heaters/boilers
- Heat exchangers
- Incinerators
- Cooling towers
- Civil/Marine
- Structures
- Geotechniccal engineering
- Marine terminal facilities
- Offsites
- Utilities
- Terminal loading facilities
- Storage facilities
- Electrical Power
- Water Treatment
MISTRAS Engineering Services provide comprehensive consulting services for non-process technologies in these primary areas:
- Specification of new or replacement equipment
- Evaluation of in-service equipment and systems
- Reliability and Maintenance
- Turnaround planning
- Maintenance planning
- Maintenance systems
- Operations reliability
- Inspection Methods and Planning
- Standards and Specifications
- Risk Based Inspection (RBI)
- Damage Assessment
- Fire investigations
- Storm damage investigations
- Energy Efficiency Studies
- Process considerations
- Maintenance and practices
- Technology and design
- Startup Assistance
- Turnover planning
- Punch list preparation
- Records management
- Close-out/acceptance procedure
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