Plant Integrity Limited inspected and assessed the integrity of an un-piggable elevated section of a 54" natural gas flare line at a refinery in the Middle East. The client had decided on guided wave ultrasonic inspection as the use of conventional non-destructive testing techniques would have required extensive scaffolding to gain access to the elevated line.
The Plant Integrity inspection team applied
Teletest® Focus+ guided wave ultrasonic testing to screen the 54" line (elevated to a height of 10m) and identified areas for detailed follow-up inspection.
The biggest challenge facing the team was the large diameter of the pipe. Historically the Teletest® Focus+ system has only been applied to pipelines of less than 48" in diameter to prevent over current errors caused by driving too large a load. Recent development and testing of a 66" diameter vessel has proved that cylindrical structures of much larger diameters can be tested with the existing equipment. For pipeline diameters above 48" three Teletest® collars need to be linked together. In this project the combination of collars was carefully chosen to select the minimum number of modules per segment to reduce the total number of sensors required for this large scale test.
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