COATING ASSESSMENT

Remote sizing and determination of coating defects

CHALLENGE

Once the pipeline is buried, the pipeline coating is often non-assessable, and very expensive to inspect for failures. Alternative methods such as DCVG (Direct Current Voltage Gradient) and CIPS (Close Interval Potential Survey) are highly dependent on soil conditions and the qualifications of the operators who operate the equipment and evaluate the data. If the soil is very dry, no cathodic protection is installed to the pipeline, or the surface is not easily accessible, standard techniques cannot be applied at all.

SOLUTION

Current Magnetometry Inspection (CMI) enables the remote detection of coating holidays with optimized resolution and relative sizing. In comparison to all other available techniques for the assessment of coating condition, CMI inspects pipeline coating seamlessly as it has a measurement grid of 1 cm.The inspection procedure used, is not depended on the ground conditions and can be remotely applied, also without any direct contact to the ground needed at all. For the delivery of coating data, the type of coating, the installation of cathodic protection and the accessibility of the area, does not matter. Consequently, CMI is not only able to locate coating defects, but also able to classify them. Our customers use Coating Assessment for pipelines with no or very limited information about the coating condition.

KEY POINTS

• Preventing external corrosion failures
• Seamless GPS-based coating inspection of the pipeline
• Not depended in ground conditions
• Differentiation between metal loss and coating failure