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Some of the issues involved in deciding on a cost-effective solution for combating corrosion are generic to sound system management.Others are specifically related to the impact of corrosion damage on system integrity and operating costs. Risk assessments can be designed to answer many questions.Some have risk hierarchies with a limited number of variables to produce a quick screening of high-risk system components. Others consider the impact of a multitude of variables in their overall assessment.
The danger in using too few variables is that the analysis becomes more qualitative than quantitative, approaching more of the fundamental indexing approach.Similarly, when considering a large number of variables, the potential exists for “diluting” the impact of rare occurrence events among the myriad of other potential problems.Therefore, the development and “fine-tuning” of the risk algorithm to insure that potentially dangerous conditions are properly identified is the most critical step in any risk analysis program.
Traditional risk management has been based on regulatory code compliance issues and the decision to perform maintenance left up to the opinion of a limited number of people, drawing off of either their own experience or an even more limited amount of information before them. Risk based models utilize a systematic and structured approach based on the consequences of failure. As such they represent a shift away from time-based tasks and emphasize the functional importance of system components and their failure/maintenance history. The following examples illustrate how these considerations are put into practice and integrated into efficient management systems.
See also: Boundary element modeling,Corrosion models, Knowledge based models, Mechanistic models, Pitting fatigue models, Risk based models
