Relief and Flare Systems Detailed
Engineering Services

Design Confirmation

Engineering and construction firms excel at designing standard systems to meet the needs of most facilities. Many have in-house guidelines and standards on which they base their engineering packages. Even if the FEED packages were reviewed, designs change with each progressing stage of a project. Reviewing the final design packages ensures that the owner/operator's requirements are followed and that what is constructed meets these requirements. Commissioning a third-party review from Smith & Burgess ensures that the owner/operator is aware of all deviations from their standards in the design packages. While not all deviations require abatement, the facility's engineering team should decide which deviations are acceptable and which are not before the equipment is ordered.

Design Validation

The FEED packages are specified. What may seem like small changes to a process design can have significant impacts on the flare and relief system sizing, and a third-party review can avoid costly re-piping and construction delays. Often, these changes require larger or different long-lead items. Our team of relief and flare systems experts can review the changes to the high-impact systems to ensure that the differences are justified. We focus our attention on the following:

• Conservative Assumptions – Our team is always on the lookout for overly conservative assumptions that increase the expected demands on relief devices, flare headers, and flare stacks and tips.
• Consistent Assumptions – Often, in the effort to capture all the loads during a utility failure (e.g., power, cooling water, steam, etc.), engineering firms make assumptions that cannot coexist (e.g., a pump is stopped for one system and then running for another in the same utility failure scenario). Our engineers are experts at looking at the modern heat-integrated facility and ensuring relief and flare systems are designed to RAGAGEP while accounting for logistically consistent scenarios.

Relief System Documentation

Many regulatory agencies (e.g., OSHA, EPA, etc.) require PSM-covered facilities to have all required Process Safety Information (PSI) in place before starting up the new process. Often, the design packages provided by the engineering firms during detailed design are not sufficient to meet the regulatory requirements for relief systems PSI or are provided in a non-editable form. Our engineers can solve two issues with one project: generating the required PSI in an editable format and reviewing the entirety of the relief and flare systems design.

Our dedication to quality reviews ensures that the facility built from the reviewed design packages will meet regulatory and corporate guidelines and standards. Our engineering services enhance overall project outcomes, ensuring a compliant facility before it is built.