REVOLUTIONIZING COKER MANAGEMENT FOR PAN AMERICAN ENERGY

Pan American Energy

PERFORMANCE IMPACT

Optimize coker performance while protecting structural integrity and extending asset life:

Increase throughput: 600 time steps per cycle let PAE engineers actively monitor and reduce cycle times by adjusting pre-heat and quench processes.
Reduce downtime: SPM revealed that fewer than 10% of coker cycles caused more than 50% of drum damage, enabling proactive prevention of over-stress events.
Extend asset life: PAE engineers moved beyond conservative estimates to maximize asset life, balancing performance and degradation with integrity insights from SPM.

DOWNLOAD SUCCESS STORY

CLIENT PERSPECTIVE

We will now be able to understand and manage our coking and other refining assets in a way never before imaginable, which will streamline our processes and help us drive shareholder value.

Javier Mascheroni
Refinery, Reliability & Maintenance Manager

CLIENT PERSPECTIVE

We are very excited about the new capabilities that Akselos brings and believe it will create a positive impact on the way we manage structural integrity. Akselos is a great example of digitalization coming to life.

Elohor Aiboni
Shell Bonga’s Asset Manager

THE CHALLENGES

Delayed Coking Units endure severe temperature gradients during quenching, localized hot and cool spots from non-uniform coke build-up, and varying cycle times – all of which accelerate structural degradation.

Replacing a coker drum costs $20–40M. With downtime compounding the impact on production targets, operators are forced to run conservatively just to safely reach the next turnaround.

Pan American Energy needed to achieve consistent, safe short cycle times to unlock throughput, keep the most damaging cycles to a minimum to extend drum life, and empower their asset integrity teams with tools to act on real structural data.

OUR APPROACH

Akselos built a high-fidelity structural twin of the PAE coker drum from as-designed/as-built data, repair history, and inspection reports. Powered by Akselos’ patented Reduced-Basis Finite Element Analysis (RB-FEA) solver — 1000x faster than conventional FEA at equivalent accuracy — the model delivers real-time insight into the coker’s most critical locations: skirt, nozzle, and welding sections.

Where traditional Fitness-For-Service assessments answer whether a drum is safe to run, Akselos SPM for Cokers tells operators which cycles are causing damage, what operational changes are increasing fatigue or crack risk, and how to optimize cycle time and throughput continuously — all within API 579-1 compliant frameworks.