The Use of Nonintrusive Ultrasonic Intelligent Sensors for Corrosion and Erosion Monitoring

Abstract

Abstract Corrosion and erosion detection and monitoring are essential prognostic means of preserving material integrity and reducing the life-cycle cost of industrial infrastructure, ships, aircraft, ground vehicles, pipelines, oil installations, etc. Spatially dynamic pipeline monitoring systems have to necessarily face extremely hostile conditions of operation including surface roughness, fluid loading issues, temperature variations, and a host of other factors that make development of a robust wall thickness assessment tool a challenging task. This paper describes the working of ClampOn's Corrosion-Erosion Monitor (CEM) - an online, real-time path based thickness assessment tool that deploys a set of transducers over a given pipe area, and utilizes a combination of resonance and dispersion based principles to assess wall thickness loss. This instrument was developed keeping the needs of the oil, gas and petrochemical industry in mind, both upstream and downstream, but because it essentially monitors reductions in wall loss, it can find applications in many other industries. Experimental and analytical work in- house provide very promising results pertaining to the functionality of the CEM system, and some of these results have been discussed in this paper. The CEM is a permanent installation on the outer pipe wall to produce real-time pipe wall thickness information, not as a spot measurement, but as a unique average path wall thickness. This state-of-the-art technology is extremely versatile, and can serve as a particle and sand monitor as well.