ITS Students Innovate Penicillin as Corrosion Prevention

ITS Campus, ITS News – Occupational accidents such as fires often occur in the oil and gas industry. Seeing this, The Safest team from Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS) analyzed the causes of the fire and provided a solution in the form of using penicillin as an environmentally friendly corrosion inhibitor.

The Safest ITS team leader, Muhammad Ihwan Nur Rifki, said that one of the crude oil processing units is the Naphtha Hydrotreating Unit (NHT). The unit removes sulfur, nitrogen, oxygen and heavy metal content in oil. “Because these elements can interfere with the next process,” he added.

The student, who is often called Ihwan, continued that there is a risk of fire in the processing process. This fire was triggered because the liquid processed at the unit was a highly flammable crude oil derivative product. “In addition, because crude oil processing is carried out at high temperatures, fires can easily occur,” he explained.

According to Ihwan, the causes of industrial fires are very diverse. Therefore, an analysis of the root causes of fires needs to be carried out to determine the appropriate preventive measures. “To carry out this analysis, we use the fault tree analysis method,” explained this Chemical Engineering Department student.

By using this method, it can be seen that leaks in pipes or processing equipment cause fires in NHT units. At the same time, the leakage itself is caused by corrosion in processing equipment made of metal. “This corrosion is the root of the problem and has several causes, namely the presence of salt deposits and acidic compounds,” said Ihwan.

Therefore, Ihwan and the team innovated an environmentally friendly corrosion inhibitor to prevent corrosion on the NHT unit. So far, the commonly used inorganic corrosion inhibitors can endanger the environment and workers, so penicillin is used, which is safer. These corrosion inhibitors work by forming a layer on the metal surface and prevent corrosion-causing compounds from coming into direct contact with the metal.