Corrosion and erosion remain two key issues in oil and gas industry. With energy demand increase transported through aged pipelines network, maintaining its integrity is a must to meet up the global demand, safety, and environmental regulations. In the last few years, there has been an increasing need for online corrosion and/or erosion monitoring tools for monitoring piping metal loss. On-line corrosion monitoring is an important component of any comprehensive corrosion control and integrity programs. Utilizing non-intrusive approach will provide flexibility in selecting the monitored locations in non-accessible or congested areas where intrusive devices may not have room to function. This paper will address a laboratory assessment program of a newly non-intrusive multi-sensors (transducers) corrosion monitoring tool. The evaluated technology is based on acoustic guided lamb waves (AGLW). The objectives of this laboratory assessment were to identify the applicability and limitations of this technology under simulated field accelerated corrosion conditions. Based on the obtained data, the system was able to report the wall thinning and to prove its functionality.
The increased demand for oil, gas, and refined products has resulted in a vast transportation network of pipelines. Monitoring these pipelines can prove difficult, expensive, and time consuming with limited results using common NDT techniques 1. Current corrosion monitoring practice within the industry is to install intrusive probes or coupons as a tool to evaluate and monitor fluid corrosivity. Intrusive corrosion monitoring probes or coupons are costly, labor-intensive, and do not provide timely warning. In addition, they cannot reflect what is happing on the monitored pipe. Some oil and gas operation companies do not prefer installation of intrusive probes in their transmission lines which are equipped with scraping facilities 2. Such decision has elevated the need to have non-intrusive tools to maintain their network integrities. Online corrosion monitoring is an important component of any comprehensive corrosion control program. It enables the operators to detect changes in corrosion behavior, enable timely remedial action to be taken, eliminate unplanned plant shutdowns, diagnose a particular corrosion problem, correlate the effect of changes in process parameters on system corrosion, assess the effectiveness of the on-going treatment chemicals program and to increase the lifespan of the equipment 2. Acoustic measurements based on guided waves techniques are attractive tools for pipeline integrity monitoring. A laboratory program to assess an available non-intrusive technology was therefore launched. The proposed system is a non-intrusive device that enables continuous measurement of corrosion or erosion damage across a large area on equipment. The program objectives were to study the functionality and limitations of the newly introduced system on reporting wall thinning in real time. Utilizing a non-intrusive approach will provide flexibility in selecting the monitoring locations in congested areas where intrusive devices may not have room to function 3.
The multi-sensors technology (MST) consists of a master unit with several sensors/transducers configured to generate a map for the scanned area. The system is based on Acoustic Guided Lamb Waves (AGLW).
