Wyoming gas plant heat exchanger explosion and failure
Appears in 1 lecture.
Appearances across the corpus
Active consulting case at time of lecture. 70-week lead time for $20M aluminum cryogenic heat exchanger replacement; quarter-billion-dollar project down. Tom uses this to motivate the case for rapid-fabrication EB/laser deposition.
In fact, I have a failure right now in a gas plant in Wyoming. They had an explosion and they lost a critical heat exchanger. The lead time is 70 weeks to buy a new one. So you've got a quarter-billion-dollar project that's down for at least 70 weeks unless they can find a spare somewhere. There's not a lot of spares of these sitting around doing nothing. $20 million aluminum heat exchangers for cryogenics — they just don't exist. Well, they exist, but someone else is using them.