Case Study: Pan American Energy reduces coker drum damage and optimizes operations with Akselos digital twins

Identifying Over-Stress Events to Optimise Coker Drums

Pan American Energy, a leading hydrocarbon producer in Argentina, faced the challenge of managing extreme operational conditions in its coker drums at the Campana refinery. The intense thermal and pressure cycles were causing significant asset damage, threatening reliability, costly downtime, and expensive replacements. To gain a precise understanding of these integrity issues and optimize their operations, they partnered with vendor Akselos to implement its structural digital twin technology.

Akselos built a high-fidelity digital twin of the coker drums, which ingested real-time operational data to perform detailed stress and fatigue analysis. This solution provided Pan American Energy with unprecedented visibility, revealing that less than 10% of operational cycles accounted for over 50% of the damage. Armed with this data, they can now optimize cycle times to increase throughput, proactively avoid over-stress events to reduce downtime, and make informed decisions to extend the overall life of their critical assets.

Pan American Energy

Javier Mascheroni

Refinery, Reliability & Maintenance Manager