Abstract
Non-intrusive, ultrasound based, corrosion/erosion monitoring systems are becoming more commonly used and accepted as a method to improve data integrity and increase productivity for Oil & Gas asset inspections – especially with underground, insulated, offshore, and other hard-to-access thickness monitoring locations (TMLs). Example applications where installed sensor technologies have been deployed successfully include crude overhead lines, sour water service, offshore risers for sand monitoring, and midstream buried pipelines. Many additional applications of these systems are anticipated to augment static thickness monitoring, improve the accuracy of thickness data/trending, and reduce pressure-boundary penetration of conventional corrosion probes while allowing both remote and real-time monitoring where desirable.
A challenge in deploying such systems in brownfield refinery applications is the ability to achieve sensor connectivity at a low cost to the plant infrastructure, allowing a dispersed amount of sensor points to exist within and among multiple process units. A wireless ultrasonic corrosion monitoring device was developed utilizing a long-range, low power wide area network (LPWAN) based on the LORA standard in a star topology. One mile connectivity was achieved in actual refinery testing. The use of a long range, star network allows multiple process units to be connected to a single gateway while preserving node battery life because nodes are not required to relay messages and only connect to the gateway directly. Cellular backhaul was used at the gateway to push data to a cloud back end for data archiving, display and analysis. This paper will review the development of the technology, key features and tradeoffs, and a review of several case studies on the deployment and use of the technology.
