Fitness for Service (FFS) Assessments

Element’s Fitness for Service (FFS) assessments help determine if your equipment is safe and fit for continued operation. It prevents failures, minimizes risks, and eliminates costly repairs.  

Assessment procedures are used by the Oil & Gas, Hydrogen, Power Generation, and Chemical Processing industries for integrity management and to evaluate fitness for service of pressure containing equipment. 

Element can evaluate the structural and mechanical integrity of a wide range of components to API 579-1/ASME FFS-1 international standards, including boiler, HRSG, pressure vessels, chemical reactors, storage tanks, piping systems, and pipelines. From design to decommissioning, our Fitness for Service assessments help you avoid brittle and ductile fracture and metal loss, make cost-effective run-repair-replace decisions, and solve problems that may arise throughout the lifecycle of a component.  

Assessments according to API 579/ASME FFS-1

Element routinely performs the API 579/ASME FFS-1 standard to assess the stability and propagation rates of different types of defects, which can be found in a component both in the design and in service. Our experts are qualified to Level 2 and 3 for NDT and metallographic replicas with specialist knowledge in fracture toughness, finite element analysis (FEA), and fatigue testing. 

Our approach

Equipment may contain flaws, become damaged, or aged so that it cannot be evaluated using the original construction codes. API 579-1/ASME FFS1 can be used to assess the equipment for continued operation. It allows:

• Thermo-mechanical analysis under operating conditions (temperature and strain): normal service, transients, predictable exceptional or faulted service conditions. 
• Structural analysis under normal operating conditions aimed at the detection of anomalies (thickness reduction due to corrosion/erosion, subsidence/displacement of supports/anchors) to evaluate the further use and the need for any corrective actions
• Design, design verification, faulted component assessment, and requalification.
• Defects propagation rate evaluation and stability assessment for operating conditions according to recognized procedures and standards (API 579, BS 7910, DNV, NE R5, NE R6). 
• Evaluation of structural inspection results and assessment of the severity of the detected flaws
• Assisting failure analysis investigation and evaluation of the plausibility of a failure scenario

The Element advantage

Element conducts Fitness for Service assessments for a broad range of products, including:

• Boiler and heat recovery steam generator components (headers, drums, etc.)
• Piping (water/steam/gas piping, process piping, penstocks, etc.)
• Turbine (rotors and housing)
• Other plant components (pressure vessels, valves, pipes, tubulars, furnaces, reactors, heat exchangers, storage tanks, etc.)