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And so what has ASME post-construction discovered since it was formed 15 years ago and began thinking about these codes and standards and about how they affect equipment in service?
Well, we went out and found codes and standards and laws and regulation. We found recommended best practices and technical information papers from all the big manufacturers and suppliers. We found companies dedicated to understanding and managing the life cycle of this equipment.
And we are finding out the things written by these organizations are very specialized – more specialized than they have ever been – and they all represent knowledge and something we need, something our industry – our country – needs to keep going. They bring us technology – very needed technology for this country. And they also support safety initiatives.
It is not easy writing and using and communicating all these standards. The success, if we can successfully utilize everything we have, is some great benefits for our country and for our industries. Our failure is going to mean more difficulty in an already troubling time.
So why is this all really important right now? Well, if you haven't noticed, the economy is in bad shape. There is foreign competition, which is beating us up badly. We need to level the playing field for our American industries. We need to find and apply new technologies, and we need to work together to build new technologies. Fitness for service, finite element, fracture mechanics – these are all very real technologies. They work, and they have been around a long time. We understand them.
And we need to embrace this technology. Not tolerate it, but embrace it. So while human safety is our number one initiative, our number one thought, we need to start thinking about availability of this equipment and capacity and upgrading the capacity. We need to find out how we can lower our maintenance cost and get longer life.
So ASME has set out to develop a guide. We wanted to bring all this information together – all the fitness for service, all the best practices – and summarize it and get it into one place.
And we have started that. We have a proposed guide, in draft right now, that provides a summary of the codes and standards and recommended practices. We are putting them all into one very simple and hopefully intuitive document.
We have a scope, and right now we will try to limit ourselves to documents issued by ANSI-accredited organizations, standards development organizations. Not that any individual document needs to be accepted by ANSI to be included, but it should be prepared by an ANSI-accredited standards development organization.
The applicability will be focused on the big things, the boilers and pressure vessels you find in large power-generating facilities and huge chemical plants. It will be focused on companies that invested a lot of money into hiring people who can use this technology. That's the intended audience.
The guides are set up, and they have definitions. There are so many definitions that were needed. We have put in just an overall listing, an alphanumeric listing of the standards covered. We tried to build a good, simple, intuitive summary of each standard. We categorized each standard by function. For example, is it intended for inspection? Is it intended for fitness for service? We also included tables that list it by the type of equipment.
And what we need from the folks in this room, from the National Board, the chiefs of the states, is your support and your acknowledgment in this endeavor. I need your thoughts, your ideas, your concerns. I need you to participate.
We have had wonderful participation by the National Board. It has brought a lot to the table. We hope that continues. We need your minds open toward these technologies I just defined – finite element and fracture mechanics. We need you to understand what we are doing and why and how we are doing it.
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