Chemical industry is a complex and important part of the global economy, industrial production, and supply chain network. The production of chemicals involves converting raw materials such as fossil fuels, water, minerals, wood, food, and metals to many chemical derivatives. All these chemical media, fluids, and derivative materials are processed, stored, and transported using special plant equipment, tanks, vessels, pumps, mixers, and pipes. Food, beverage, pharmaceutical, chemical, petrochemical, paper, water desalination, or similar plants are subgroups of chemical industry plants.
Chemical reactions or raw materials produce a corrosive environment which contains acids, salt solutions, alkaline solutions or metallic ions, or combination of them. Generally, the service environment is a combination of different factors, e.g., pressure, temperature, and most importantly corrosion types like general corrosion, pitting corrosion, intergranular corrosion stress corrosion cracking, or galvanic corrosion. Proper base metal selection for equipment made according to existing corrosion types, required corrosion resistance, temperature resistance, and mechanical properties. In addition to international standards, fabrication specifications, and end-user’s specifications determine the exact base metal and fabrication requirements in the chemical industry.
Depending on the requirements, chemical industry equipment can be constructed from unalloyed steels and low alloy steels, stainless steels, heat resistance steels, nickel alloys, and Ni/Cu alloys. Fabrication can be done by different welding and cutting processes according to conditions, methods and constraints. Shielded metal arc welding, gas metal arc welding, gas tungsten arc welding, flux cored arc welding and submerged arc welding processes are used together with plasma cutting. For each chemical application, different base metal and different welding processes necessitates a wide range of welding consumables and power sources.
The most important concern in fabrication is welding procedure approval, which includes joint preparation, welding steps and parameters, post-weld cleaning with pickling and passivation. All steps have to be done carefully to meet the requirements. Corrosion resistance of the welded joints is proved by specific corrosion tests during welding procedure approval. Then approved welding procedure can be applied in fabrication safely.
Welding joint surfaces shall be smooth and clean. Magmaweld plasma cutting equipment is designed to provide a very smooth surface and inox abrasives cleans oxidized thin film on the surface. Welding power sources enable precise control of welding parameters and wave control like pulse, double pulse, etc. both in thick and thin materials. Controlling welding heat input will secure the resultant corrosion resistance. Welding consumable has primary and also a vital role on meeting the corrosion resistance requirements. By means of post-weld cleaning with Inox Past chemicals provide clean and passive welded joint surfaces on the equipment.
Magmaweld has been serving the chemical industry for more than 60 years with this wide product range and enginering expertise. Magmaweld’s technical team will assist you to meet the chemical industry’s requirements with his optimum and economical welding product solutions