Fire protection for Kirishi refinery project in Russia

London - Intertec Instrumentation Ltd is supplying over 100 fire protection cabinets to support Emerson Process Management's instrumentation contract for the new hydrocracker complex at the Kirishi oil refinery near St Petersburg, Russia. The cabinets will provide the valve actuators with a minimum of 30 minutes of protection against fire, so that the plant's emergency shut down systems and services can quickly isolate and minimise damage, to protect employees, assets and environment.

The cabinets are made from high-quality glass fibre reinforced polyester (GRP), which claims Intertec, is very stable and highly resistant to corrosion from the petrochemical media at the plant. A proprietary construction process developed by Intertec allows the company to fabricate the material into complex enclosure shapes, and the new cabinets are variations of a field-proven product known as the Intertec Fire Shelter.

Emerson is the field instrumentation vendor for the hydrocracking complex at Kirishi refinery, a subsidiary of Surgutneftegas. Emerson chose Intertec because no off-the-shelf solution existed for this application, and because of previous experience with the vendor, according to an Intertec statement.

The cabinets will house valve actuators that are critical to plant operation and fail-safe shutdown. They have been fabricated using a sandwich construction of non-combustible insulation and long fibre reinforced GRP sheeting. This provides the required fire protection time as well as high strength, very high resistance to weather and the possible corrosive effects of the chemicals produced at the plant.

To validate performance before installation, the independent Russian institution, Pozhaudit, tested an example cabinet. The test demonstrated that the internal temperature did not rise above 60 degrees C for at least 30 minutes when subjected to an oil based fire with a temperature of around 1000 degrees C.

According to Intertec project manager, Klaus-Dieter Meyer: "This protection is required quite commonly, yet there are no Russian or German norms for the exact application. So, to help plant engineers specify with confidence, we have subjected our enclosures to detailed fire tests, with an array of sensors that show temperatures at various internal points."

Intertec is an international supplier of unique systems designed to provide protection of sensitive field-mounted instruments. The company has production sites in Belgium, Canada, Germany, The Netherlands  the UK and the US.