Permasense goes global with live corrosion monitoring system
Posted: 11 November 2010
Breakthrough integrity monitoring system signals step change in data availability, enabling better decision-making for oil and gas facilities
Monitoring systems specialist Permasense reported the commercial availability of a new system for monitoring the integrity of oil and gas infrastructure.
The system, developed in partnership with Imperial College London and BP, heralds a new age of frequent, repeatable wall thickness monitoring that will give corrosion engineers, inspectors, planners and plant managers previously unavailable insights into the condition and capability of critical oil & gas assets.
"By deploying this technology globally, BP has seen a step change in the capability of our integrity monitoring activities," said Dr Charles Cameron, Head of Research & Technology for BP’s Refining & Marketing segment.
"We are proud of the role we have played in the development of a technology that we believe will be of enormous benefit to the oil and gas industry as a whole."
The Permasense system has been proven in operation at BP’s European refineries and in the US as part of BP's Refining & Logistics Technology program, and is being used at BP refineries world-wide.
Corrosion monitoring itself presents significant technological and practical challenges. Inspections typically take place at infrequent intervals, are expensive to perform and offer little chance of the consistency needed to accurately identify wall thickness trends at an early stage.
The Permasense system, based on a network of permanently positioned, ultrasonic wall thickness measurement sensors, enables better decision-making by providing more consistent and robust corrosion data on-demand at no incremental cost.
This system, developed by one of the world’s leading teams in the field of non-destructive evaluation at Imperial College London, is based on a patented, waveguide-mounted sensor design. The sensors can be permanently attached to pipes operating in extreme conditions – temperatures from -40°C to 550°C - and difficult-to-access locations.
The sensors are linked via a wireless network to provide data directly to the user for standalone viewing or integration into other plant monitoring systems. The sensors have ATEX and FM approval in Europe, the US and Australia.
Posted by Richard Price, Editor EnergyME.com
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