A methodology to estimate the remaining residual life of components of processes subjected to corrosion using the extreme value theory combined with the first-order reliability method

The main goal of this contribution is to propose a numerical method to determine the minimum sample size and the remaining useful life of industrial assets suffering from general corrosion. The method merges the extreme value theory by using the Peak-Over-Threshold method combined with the Generalized Pareto Distribution to obtain an optimized sample size used to perform the integrity assessment of industrial assets using the first-order reliability method. Moreover, this method can be used to extrapolate the corrosion data obtained by inspection to uninspected areas of the assets to estimate their maximum wall loss. To demonstrate the main features and capabilities of the proposed methodology, the dataset of AISI 1018 steel tubes of a heat exchanger subjected to a general corrosion-type extreme process are addressed herein. The main steps of numerical implementation and foundations required to perform the methodology are also provided. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is an interesting tool for the inspection process to determine the minimum sample size and to evaluate the structural integrity of industrial assets subjected to extreme events such as general corrosion.