Many tanks and vessels can be coated to extend their usable life and reduce their lifetime operating expense but the usable life of the coating hinges on several factors which might not seem immediately obvious. Selecting the optimal coating from the myriad of available coatings can be a major undertaking in and of itself. Once a suitable coating is identified, it needs to be applied, cured, and inspected to ensure that no mistakes were made during application which could reduce the useable life of the coating system.

At a minimum the candidate coating should pass a few key accelerated tests before being considered for immersion service. The coating under consideration should have passed a full six month atlas cell test as per NACE TM-0174. Because atlas cell testing can be performed with any chemical or chemicals at any concentration and temperature, it is important to ensure that the atlas cell testing was performed with a mix of chemicals which closely mimics the service in the vessel to be coated and then at a temperature at least as high as the normal operation temperature of the vessel. Many major operators further stipulate that aggressive conditions experienced during the atlas cell shall not reduce the direct tension adhesion of the coating by more than 50%. This helps eliminate coatings which don’t fail during the six month test but are significantly compromised and so will not yield satisfactory useable life in the field. Finally, the most thoroughly tested coatings will also provide electrochemical impedance spectroscopy data before and after atlas cell testing. Of particular interest is the capacitance of the coating at 10-2Hz which corresponds to the onset of general corrosion beneath the coating. The value is given on a log scale and should be 8.0 or higher at a minimum while values above 10.5 are remarkable and should translate into decades as an outstanding corrosion barrier.

Just as important as selecting a coating is ensuring it is applied correctly. A quality coating manufacturer should be willing to help author a coating specification for the project and provide coating inspectors to oversee the work. Better still would be for the coating inspectors to be employed directly by the end user and be totally independent of the coating manufacturer and coating applicator in order to eliminate any potential conflict and ethical issues. Belzona routinely offers everything discussed above for desalters, flare knock out drums, amine strippers, amine regenerators, slop oil tanks, crude oil storage tanks, debutanizers, distillation towers, and separators just to name a few. Regardless of which particular asset is to be coated, Belzona has both the products and the expertise to ensure a successful and long-lived lining.

Chris Lucas 
clucas@rumfordgroup.com
937-435-4650
RumfordGroup.com

Time sure does fly, 35 years have gone by

On January 11, 1980 Rumford Industrial Group was incorporated, becoming the Great Lakes Region distributor for Belzona® polymeric repair compounds and industrial protective coatings.

We are honored to know that you rely on us to repair, protect and improve your machinery, equipment, buildings and structures when things stop working.  We trust that you’ll allow us to continue to be a trusted business partner for the next 35 years and beyond.

On behalf of our employees and associates, thank you so very much for the opportunity to be of service.

Jim Rumford

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