PED reclassification with SEIMS

Chemical plants have all kinds of process installations operating under pressure; these include large heat exchangers, reactors and the piping in-between. The 2016 Commodities Act Decree for Pressure Equipment (WBDA2016) requires that all pressure equipment (pressure vessels and pipelines) present on an industrial site be classified on the basis of the Pressure Equipment Directive (PED). Among other things this determines whether pressure equipment must undergo inspection.

Pressure equipment subject to inspection must be inspected once every four or six years by an accredited inspector to ensure that it can be operated safely. For a large factory this might involve more than 10,000 pipes and 500 pressure vessels needing to be classified individually so as to determine the inspection requirement. Quite a job! Witteveen+Bos has developed the SEIMS.PED system for this purpose: a database that simplifies the inventory and classification work enormously.

Witteveen+Bos launched its first PED project in 2018. The data required for the PED classification was recorded in a range of Excel sheets. It became increasingly difficult to keep track during the project; the data entered was not easily traceable and when data changed, such as the protected pressure, the PED classification had to be performed again, often for dozens of pressure equipment items. So the question soon arose as to whether this could be done more smartly, faster and less error-prone.

This is why SEIMS.PED was developed. The data required for the PED classification can be entered easily in SEIMS.PED, and can be augmented with additional explanations and sources. SEIMS.PED can then determine the classification automatically, because the legislation and guidelines are programmed in it. When imported data is changed, SEIMS.PED automatically determines the new classification for all the objects to which it applies.

The features and automations continue to develop because the SEIMS.PED users and developers work closely together. The success of SEIMS.PED led to a second PED project, at the ICL chemical plant in Terneuzen. We expect to be able to use the PED expertise we have gained in further projects in the future.