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Travis Field
Travis Field is a pipe welding specialist and founder of Pipe Welding Institute, focused on controlled welding execution in high-integrity piping applications.
He holds Red Seal Journeyman Welder and Alberta B-Pressure certifications and has extensive experience with advanced alloy systems across Canada and the United States.
Field is an AWS Certified Welding Inspector( CWI), holds API 571 certification, and has been granted O-1 classification for extraordinary ability in welding technology.
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Why 304H wins: A value-engineering
In the debut column for Stainless Steel World Americas, Travis Field, pipe welding specialist and founder of Pipe Welding Institute, walks through a valueengineering materials selection case comparing high-temperature piping alloys for PDH and steam-service piping systems, and explains why 304H emerged as the strongest overall fit.
Field GTAW welding of 304H stainless piping during fabrication of a high-temperature process system.
A materials selection walkthrough from a Canadian PDH and polypropylene plant
Specifying a metal for a hot service is a balancing act between three things that don’ t naturally agree: the alloy has to survive what the service throws at it, last as long as the asset is supposed to live, and cost what the project can actually afford. Take, for example, an integrated Propane Dehydrogenation( PDH) and polypropylene plant in Alberta, Canada— two plants on the same site, tied together by piping.
Propane Dehydrogenation takes propane( C 3
H 8
) and strips two hydrogen atoms off it to ake propylene( C 3
H 6
). Propylene is the building block for polypropylene, the plastic in everything from yogurt containers to car bumpers to medical syringes. The propylene flows directly from the PDH unit into the polymerization plant next door. Alberta has cheap propane from natural gas processing, so it’ s an attractive place to build this kind of facility.
Two worlds under one roof In any chemical plant, you have two broad worlds: the process side and the power side. The process side is everything that touches the actual chemicals— the feed, the intermediates, the product. The power side is the supporting cast: steam, cooling water, instrument air, nitrogen, fuel gas. When an engineer says,“ on the process side,” they mean the equipment and piping that hold the hydrocarbons themselves. Two services share this site, and each comes with its own materials problem.
Stainless Steel World Americas | June 2026 | ssw-americas. com