Plant costs embrittlement

A simple cell design is required to reduce capital costs. The cost of the raw materials, HF and electricity, are not negligible, but they are minor. The pilot plant cell design shown in Fig. 16 is derived from the callandria cell developed for the Phillips ECF process.14 The cell body and internals are of mild steel pipe selected to be resistant to hydrogen embrittlement. Figure 17 is a horizontal section through the working part of the cell. 

The total cost of material fracture is about 4% of gross domestic product in the United States and Europe (88,89). Fracture modes included in the cost estimates were stress-induced failures (tension, compression, flexure, and shear), overload, deformation, and time-dependent modes, such as fatigue, creep, SCC, and embrittlement. The environmentally assisted corrosion problem is very much involved in the maintenance of the safety and reliability of potentially dangerous engineering systems, such as nuclear power plants, fossil fuel power plants, oil and gas pipelines, oil production platforms, aircraft and aerospace technologies, chemical plants, and so on. Losses because of environmentally assisted cracking (EAC) of materials amount to many billions of dollars annually and is on the increase globally (87). 

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