In-Line Service For Internal Inspection Of Unpiggable Buried Oil Pipelines Using Long Range Ultrasound Guided Waves In Fifty Metre Segments
Acronym: PIGWaves
Funding body: European Commission
Status: Completed
This proposal will aim to develop the enabling technology that will enable existing pipe crawling robots (pigs) to provide internal inspection of pipe walls using long range ultrasound guided waves (LRUG) deployed in pipe segments of about fifty metre length. The aim is to perform total volume inspection far more rapidly, accurately and cheaply than is presently achieved with magnetic and ultrasonic pigs by developing a circumferential collar of LRUG sensors and novel time reversal focussing to produce a map of the circumferential and axial pipe corrosion and cracks. As LRUG sensors detect all significant corrosion in oil and gas pipelines within typically 50 metre of the sensors in a few milliseconds, long lengths of pipe can be scanned very rapidly with sample wave echo patterns obtained only every 50 metres thereby data storage requirements will be orders of magnitude less than present inspection methods.