ABSTRACT
Diakont Advanced Technologies was commissioned to assess the integrity of a natural gas pipeline that was partially buried under an urban area on a major North American pipeline. The company used a reduced size robotic crawler to successfully navigate a 10 in. pipe. The size of this pipe has previously been a limitation, making it ‘unpiggable’ using other ILI methods.
Designated as a high consequence area (HCA) due to being located in a densely populated area, this section of pipeline had never been inspected. Low flow, its narrow 10 in. internal diameter (ID), and its characteristics (tight bends, plug valves etc.) made the pipe unsuitable for traditional smart pigging. However, the United States’ federal Pipeline and Hazardous
Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) regulations require specific integrity management programs in HCAs.
The pipeline's inspection challenges could have forced its operator to replace an entire quarter of a mile length of pipe if they could not inspect the line effectively and on schedule. The technology gap between the inspection requirements and the available tooling forced the industry work with pipeline service vendors to develop a suitable solution.
New Technology: Reduced Size and Self Propelled
The new robotic crawler tooling traverses challenging pipeline geometries using a ruggedized multiple track system, which allows for navigation across horizontal surfaces. Moreover, the tool can extend the tracks to the pipe wall for stabilization. This arrangement provides the traction that is necessary to hold the tool rigidly in place while inspecting difficult-to access pipeline applications (such as inclines and vertical sections), where conventional ILI tools may not be feasible. This Sprinter system moves at a deliberate pace to provide accurate mapping of anomaly locations within the pipeline. Being self-propelled and bidirectional, the Sprinter can also be deployed and retrieved from a single access point, which was another key feature in its selection for this inspection program.
INTRODUCTION
Diakont Advanced Technologies used a robotic crawler to assess the integrity of a natural gas pipeline partially buried under an urban area for a major North American pipeline. The reduced-size crawler successfully navigated a 10-in. pipe—a size limitation that had previously made this pipeline ”unpiggable” using other ILI methods.
