API 660: Shell & Tube Heat Exchangers: Design, Welding, Fabrication, Inspection, Testing, Operation, Maintenance & Troubleshooting

Heat exchangers are where thermal design, mechanical design and corrosion meet, and they fail more often than their cost suggests they should. Most of it traces back to specification: a tube material chosen on price, a layout that cannot be cleaned, a datasheet that left the vibration check to somebody who never did it. This week works through API 660 and the TEMA classes alongside it, covering what the purchaser has to specify, what the fabricator is entitled to assume, and what the inspector checks. The tube to tubesheet joint gets a session of its own, because it is both the commonest leak path and the hardest thing to repair in the field.

It runs 7 times over the published calendar, in 6 cities and live online. Every date is the same programme with the same content and the same certificate.

• Write an exchanger datasheet that leaves nothing important to assumption.
• Read a TEMA type designation, and know what it implies for maintenance.
• Specify tube to tubesheet joints and the testing that proves them.
• Anticipate vibration, fouling and thermal fatigue at the design stage.
• Plan inspection and cleaning so the unit can actually be maintained.

Mechanical and process engineers specifying or reviewing exchangers, inspection and integrity engineers, maintenance engineers responsible for exchanger reliability, and procurement engineers handling the datasheets.

Short input, then work. Across 5 days of roughly 6 teaching hours each, the balance sits deliberately with the second: a programme where the trainer talks for six hours produces notes rather than capability.

• Your own material

  Exercises run on situations delegates bring, not on a case study written for a different organisation in a different decade.

• A capped cohort

  Small enough that everybody is asked something. Executive programmes are capped tighter still.

• Practice under scrutiny

  The difficult conversation, the challenged assumption, the decision defended out loud. Judgement is not built by watching.

• Something to take back

  Each day ends with a thing you can use on Monday rather than a slide deck you will not reopen.

• A reviewed datasheet for one real exchanger, with the gaps closed.
• A tube joint specification with acceptance criteria.
• An inspection and cleaning plan for a unit on your own plant.

A GATI certificate recording what you attended, issued after the programme has run and attendance has been taken. Attending at least 80 per cent of the days earns a certificate of completion; attending less earns a certificate of attendance stating exactly what was attended.

Every certificate carries a code that anybody can check against GATI's own record, which is what makes it worth holding. It records participation. This site will not imply one it does not have.