It's not just ordinary carbon steel anymore for refineries and many other PVF users in process industries that generate hydrogen fluoride (HF), a poisonous gas that when dissolved in water produces hydrofluoric acid. In order to stave off a potential disaster of Bhopal magnitude or worse, customers are requesting that PVF suppliers provide product with material chemistry that meets HF service requirements.
John Lafferty, marketing manager and sales engineer for Penn Machine, addressed the background and specifics of HF service in a presentation to Houston's PVF Roundtable last Feb. 18. Some highlights of his presentation follow: