Corrosion Under Insulation (CUI) – out of Sight Should It be out of Mind?

Every year billions of dollars are wasted by the chemical industry due to corrosion related incidents or mitigations. Process safety is the foremost responsibility of engineers supporting production facilities. While engineering controls are put in place it is assumed pipes and valves will hold reliably. In order to conserve energy of the process or ensure personnel protection pipes need to be insulated. The metal surface of the insulated pipes being out of sight obviously gets out of mind. CUI (Corrosion Under Insulation) is an omnipresent risk in every chemical facility that needs to be evaluated and appropriate actions need to be taken to prevent CUI. Oftentimes, it is already too late, by the time CUI issue is surfaced. In this talk we will identify techniques to prevent CUI from becoming a problem and also ways to remediate CUI in case it is already an issue. Real world industrial examples of solutions available will be discussed to bring awareness on the topic that can seldom go overlooked. Good engineering practices will also be discussed that should be considered while designing chemical manufacturing facilities to avoid CUI.