| dc.description.abstract | Abstract
The petrochemical industry is one of Taiwan′s most important industrial sectors and its manufacturing products are very closely associated with our daily lives. However, certain equipment or parts of the manufacturing process may occasionally leak trace quantities of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) which may cause health hazards and endanger the environment. Conventionally, petrochemical industries employed measuring methods promulgated officially for detecting and controlling for VOCs leakages (such as flame ionization detector, or FID). However, persons use FID to detect leakages need to come close to the equipment and parts. Such operation not only increases health risks for the said person but also proves to be time consuming. To make the matter worse, the elevated equipment or parts are intrinsically hard to detect and thus carry drawbacks of detecting and management difficulties.
The results show that the three parts most vulnerable in leaking rate are “Sampling connecting system” (2.2%), “Compressor” (1.9%), and “Release valve” (0.8%), respectively. In contrast, “Flange” (F) and “Other connecting joints” (N) are the two parts most vulnerable in leaking in terms of inspection frequency. To summarize the leaking information in five plants, “one leaking spot” in a day detected most frequently with a total of 131 spots (days), which holds 37.0% of total. The leaking ratios of each to total parts (across all parts) in ordinary and hard detected parts are 96.2 and 3.8%, respectively; however, that of hard detected part to its total can reach as high as 20.9% . The repaired duration of “three to fifteen days” is most common for leaking parts.
In contrast to conventional method, Infrared (IR) thermography is with the merits of faster detection with higher throughputs, visualization on leaking spot, and easy detection on hard accessible locations. | en_US |