Corrosion under insulation detection and prediction in steel pipes

General Information

The main objective of this project is to develop automated non-destructive testing (NDT) equipment and a Digital Twin platform in close cooperation with a European consortium. The aim is to detect and size localized corrosion under insulated piping systems (CUI) at an early stage, and to classify the identified damages by employing a data-driven approach. Moreover, the CUIDETECT project will develop a maintenance procedure for several industry sectors including the oil and gas based on corrosion detection by means of PEC (Pulse Eddy Current) and EMAT (Electro Magnetic Acoustic Transducer) ultrasonic inspection and modelling of CUI. Automated equipment will be developed in order to enable moving the PEC probes along the pipe, reaching difficult to access areas, reducing the inspection time and increasing the inspection precision.
Long-range ultrasonic testing (LRUT) will be deployed using EMAT by removing 50cm of isolation every 200m (100 m in both sides of the pipe). LRUT is for fast screening of areas with CUI. PEC will be used for the quantification and sizing of material losses without need for removing the insulation on areas of corrosion identified by the LRUT. In this case the automatic device will be necessary to move and position the probe along and around the tube.
The project will not only contribute to the assessment of the integrity of industrial assets but will also provide a deeper understanding of the progression of detected damages to facilitate predictive maintenance using a novel Digital Twin model.
The Hereon team will develop computational models to predict the progression of the classified damages and subsequently encode their results in a computationally less expensive machine learning model. Moreover, Hereon will contribute to the the corrosion prediction software that is developed within the project to visualize detected damages and to provide an estimate for their severity.
CUIDETECT is funded in the frame of EUROSTARS, the European Union Partnership on innovative Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs). It is a joint programme between more than 30 EUREKA member countries and the European Union.

EU-Programme Acronym and Subprogramme Area	EUROSTARS (EU Partnership on innovative SMEs)
Project Type	EUROSTARS innovation project
Contract Number	01QE2203C
Co-ordinator	INNERSPEC TECHNOLOGIES UK LTD (UK)

Funding for the Project (€)	Funding for Hereon (€)
1,427,019	246,443

Contact Person at Hereon

Dr. Christian Feiler, Institute of Surface Science, Department of Interface Modeling, MOM, Phone: +49 4152 87 2125 E-mail contact

Participants

Design, Business & Verification Services SL (ES), Innerspec Technologies UK LTD (UK), NUROMEDIA GmbH (DE), ROBOLAN Ingenieria Robotica SL (ES)

Last Update: 09. August 2022