Corrosion Monitoring
Corrosion causes billions of dollars of damage to structures worldwide on an annual basis. All metal structures are potentially affected, including especially aging aircraft and underground pipelines.
The direct costs come in the form of either premature deterioration or failure, thus resulting in the need for maintenance, repair, and/or replacement of damaged assets. Additional costs come from increased downtime, lost production, and the need to install additional standby capacity in order to alleviate the uncertainty associated with corrosion-induced failures and/or unscheduled maintenance.
Current approaches for detecting corrosion are labor-intensive and expensive, and inspection is generally limited only to accessible areas of the structure. Performing frequent inspections to monitor the growth of corrosion over time results in even higher overall maintenance costs.
Early detection is the best way to prevent inconveniences and catastrophes, as well as reduce operational and maintenance costs throughout the lifecycle of the asset. Therefore, corrosion detection is an important application for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM).
Acellent's SHM-RAPID (Realtime Active Pipeline Integrity Detection) software is designed specifically for the energy industry. It brings the advantages of SHM to pipelines and other critical infrastructure by detecting and quantifying the rate of corrosion- and/or erosion-induced loss of wall thickness in pipes and other similar metal structures.
