Fitness For Service

Fitness for Service (FFS) is a best practise and industry standard used in the oil and gas and chemical process industries to determine the fitness of in-service equipment for continuing operation.Corrosive conditions and/or excessive temperatures are frequently encountered by a process, facility, or equipment. The material used in the equipment can decay or age over time in these settings. When critical equipment, such as pressure vessels, pipes, and storage tanks, reaches the end of its useful life, the plant operator must decide whether it can continue to run safely and reliably to avoid accidents to employees and the public, environmental damage, and unplanned shutdowns. The plant operator can use fitness for service assessment techniques to make informed judgments based on recognised engineering principles.
Provider fitness Assessment is a multidisciplinary engineering examination that assures that all process and plant equipment, such as pressure vessels, pipes, and tanks, perform safely and reliably throughout the duration of the operation and until the next turnaround or planned downtime. ASME, API, BS 5500, and other internationally recognised design codes give rules/guidelines for determining suitability for service. This technique assesses the equipment's residual strength in its current state, which may have deteriorated from its initial state. Corrosion, localised corrosion, pitting and crevice corrosion, hydrogen attack, embrittlement, fatigue, high-temperature creep, and mechanical deformation are all common degradation mechanisms.
Fitness-for-service evaluations look at the structural integrity of components as well as their appropriateness for long-term use. The integrity of critical pressure components and welded structures can be tested against multiple failure modes utilising established engineering procedures such as BS 7910:2013, API 579/ASME FFS-1, ASME B31G, DNV-OS-F101, and FITNET.