Pipeline Inspection Locate Identify Potential Weld Failure Locations
Introduction
Welds are used in the making of the pipeline itself, in the joining of pipelines and components during construction, and during maintenance and repair of the pipeline system. During the pipeline manufacturing process, longitudinal welds join the edges of steel plate to form sections of pipeline (spools). Also during manufacture, girth (or circumferential) welds sometimes join sections of pipelines – called ”double-jointing” – to speed installation. In addition, many welds have to be performed at the construction site to join together pipelines sections and other components to create a pipeline system – these are almost always girth welds. And during maintenance and repair, many other types of welds are also used.
Material or weld failures can result in both public safety and environmental hazards due to the release of petroleum and natural gas products. From 1996 – 2003, there were four injuries attributed to material/weld failures in the natural gas industry [src: PHMSA].
Project description
One of the oil fields of our client, has very old pipeline infrastructure of two and three inch pipelines. There was no conventional inline inspection tool that could inspect these small pipelines and thus the pipelines had never been inspected. When our client had a failure with a pipeline in the area, they started looking for a solution to pro-actively inspect the pipelines in this field. The client chose to use Pipers®.
The Pipers® solution
INGU’s Pipers® solution pairs a baseball-sized free-floating multi-sensor system with AI powered data analytics and a GIS Pipeline viewer. The Pipers® solution accurately identifies and locates potential issues such as leaks, deposits, and changes in the pipeline wall that threaten pipeline health.
While flowing through the pipeline, Pipers® continuously measure the pipeline’s magnetic flux. We use artificial intelligence to identify the pipeline joints in the magnetic flux density data with a better than 95% identification rate. Subsequently the joint patterns within a pipeline can be compared to determine outliers that are indicative of bad welds.
Results
A typical weld signal is a narrow peak in the magnetic flux data as highlighted by the green area. The area highlighted in red was also identified as a weld, but the structure contains multiple peaks and is broad so it was reported as a bad weld. The client did a verification dig and found the weld as shown in the picture above.
Pipeline specifications
Pipeline Length | 0.78 kilometers |
Pipeline Diameter | 2 inch |
Pipeline Material | Steel |
Content | Oil emulsion |
Location | Canada |