Coating Assessment

Maintenance Painting Practices for Offshore Oil and Gas Structures

Maintenance Painting Practices for Offshore Oil & Gas Structures: Part One

Offshore oil and gas structures, typically floating production, storage and offloading vessels, or FPSO, and the more conventional fixed platforms, are usually very complex assemblies of fabricated steelwork, metalwork, pressure vessels, structural members, tanks, pressure equipment, valves, pumps, screens and pipework crammed into a very tight and congested deck footprint. The most widely used material […]

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coating inspection of Saponification

Saponification: From Paint to the Grave

At its very basic level, saponification is the term given to the process in which vegetable oils and animal fats are converted into soap. We recognize soaps as wax-like products, modified through the addition of fragrances and skin-care additives (emollients) to become consumer cleaning and bathing products. The essential step in the soap-making process is

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Coating Failure

Clues to a Coating Failure

A consultant follows the facts to discover why perfectly good, recently applied paint fell from a new steel ceiling and to find the source of the coating failure. It wasn’t like the sky was falling, but when large pieces of paint dropped from the roof deck onto machinery being installed in a newly built manufacturing

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Paint Consulting

The Case of Bubbles, and Pinholes, and Blisters, Oh My! -Coating Condition Assessment

This month’s Case from the F-Files describes the problem of bubbles, pinholes, and blisters in a polyurethane finish coat applied to new structural steel members at a coal-fired power generation plant. Many of the pinholes and bubbles were so small that they were difficult to detect with the unaided eye. Many of the largest blisters

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Metal Roof Repair

Failure Analysis: When Metal Roof Coatings Fail

A variety of coating system choices can be applied to metal roofing, including acrylic, epoxy/polyurethane, and fluoropolymer systems. Specifications frequently call for fluoropolymer coatings, which are considered to offer the best performance in long-term weathering resistance. Roof panels are fabricated from sheet-metal substrates such as steel, galvanized steel, aluminum, and other metals. Galvanized steel (a

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Moisture Intrusion

Moisture Intrusion: The Achilles Heel of Single-Wythe CMU

This is a continuation of the article published in the January/February 2013 issue of Durability + Design, “Repair The Building Before You Repair The Paint.” In that article, a number of building repairs associated with single-wythe concrete masonry units (CMU) were discussed – repairs that should be undertaken before additional coating is applied, including problems with

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The Contractor Who Almost Got Floored

Most of the past Cases from the F-Files have focused primarily (although not exclusively) on coating failures on steel. However, coating failures can and do occur on other substrates such as aluminum, wood, and concrete, to name a few. In this case, a warehouse concrete floor coating was exhibiting blistering only a few months after

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When A Good Idea Goes Bad

An American tobacco company owned a number of large buildings, essentially steel-framed warehouses covered with corrugated galvanized steel panels, at one of its facilities. The company used the warehouse buildings for the fumigation of the tobacco, during which the entire interior of the building is filled with a gaseous insecticide that kills tobacco-damaging insects. Unfortunately,

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Repair the building before you repair the paint

Repair The Building Before You Repair The Paint

When the paint on the exterior of a building exhibits heavy fading, chalking, or peeling, the typical solution is to clean and overcoat, but painting alone may not achieve the desired result, and in fact, it may be destined to fail. Because a number of building-related issues can affect the performance of the coating system,

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