Programme details

The paper discusses the latest technology development for Non Intrusive Corrosion Erosion Monitoring for subsea installations. Subsea production templates, flow jumpers, manifolds and flow lines can today only be inspected by pre-installation of corrosion/erosion sensors or by use of ROC-operated sensors. Current pre-installed sensor systems for monitoring pipeline integrity have proven to be of limited value to the operators and ROV-operated sensors only provide indicative and unreliable readings. A major challenge is that “hot-spots”, i.e. areas particularly susceptible to erosion/corrosion, are often detected after the template has been in operation for a while. Accordingly, the ability to retrofit a corrosion-erosion monitor (CEM) on identified hot spots subsea is crucial. ClampOn has over many years developed a new technique for measuring changes in pipe wall thickness over a pre-determined pipe area using only a limited number of sensors. This technology has been installed and deployed topside and is now ready for subsea installations. Monitoring of pipe integrity is increasingly important as installations grow older. ClampOn’s Corrosion-Erosion Monitor (CEM) is an online, real-time path based thickness assessment tool that deploys a set of transducers over a give pipe area, and utilizes a dispersion based principle to assess wall thickness loss. The need in the industry for reliable monitoring of changes in wall thickness in subsea pipelines encouraged us to develop the instrument for subsea applications. The CEM uses ultrasonic guided waves, called Lamb waves, to perform its measurement, covering a much larger distance along the pipe surface than any other spot measurements systems with a comparable number of transducers.