Corrosion Under Insulation (CUI): Tackle Your Approach

After prioritizing your assets, take the time to evaluate the likely areas where CUI may exist and implement a Minimally Invasive Inspection Plan. A proper risk analysis, as described in API RPF 583, will serve as a guide to determine what percentage of an asset should be examined and the extent of the effectiveness. This effort is intended to identify areas where CUI is suspected with support from real inspection data such as radiography or guided wave that can keep most of your insulation intact.

This effort will provide you with the justification that you need to strip insulation in specific areas potentially reducing insulation and coating costs or at the very least, ensuring the appropriate amount of time and money is spent on the areas that need it the most. The inspections you do today based on the data you already had becomes the data you are going to use in the future when you start building your program for the next round of inspections.

After you have created your Minimally Invasive Inspection plan begin mitigating CUI. There are so many ways to mitigate CUI that it truly just depends on the circumstance of each individual asset. Let’s dive into a few examples.

Evaluate your coating program as it relates to insulated assets. There are some insulation types that do not necessarily play nice with certain coatings. Often the re-coating and re-insulating efforts happen independently of one another. Putting eyes on these procedures has the potential to mitigate future issues.

Develop a training program after you find a pattern within insulation damage in high foot traffic areas to help others understand how that trickles down into your budget.

Consider the amount of CML’s you place on insulated lines and how that number is going to dictate how many ports you need. On the other hand, CML’s could be placed on personnel protection insulation and you need to make sure that you are not re-insulate things that don’t need to be insulated.

Finally, we conclude with the most important step. Make sure to collect strong and solid data that can be fed back to a place where you can use it in the future. For example, it will not do you any good to keep a range of field data in your inspection report. Make sure that all your data verification is being held in either your IDMS system, CMMS system, or wherever it is that you are going to be pulling data from the next time you perform a susceptibility evaluation.

As a result, your feedback loop should feed better data into the next iteration of your CUI efforts and should yield better results in the future to help de-specialize emphasis on our CUI program.

By creating a proactive approach, you change the way your money is spent on CUI within your facility.  Focusing your energy and time on the phases above will allow you to evergreen your investment so that your program will continue to pay off in the future. Want to learn more? Check out our webinar, Corrosion Under Insulation: A Proactive Vs. Reactive Approach, to dive deeper into the phases here.