Offshore staff
HORDALAND, Norway – TSC Subsea has designed a new remotely deployed tool to inspect ovality and wall thickness in constricted locations.
The company’s engineers designed and built the ART vCaliper in less than four weeks to meet the requirements of a project in the Gulf of Mexico. A client needed to perform ovality and thickness checks on a potential hot tapping location on a gas pipeline.
Access to the hot tapping inspection site was crowded with pipe work and clamps. This made it not only difficult to use standard scanners but also posed a danger to divers.
The ART vCaliper is a non-intrusive, remotely deployed advance inspection system that uses the company’s field proven acoustic resonance technology (ART).
According to the company, it is the only high-resolution inspection technology available that can penetrate thick subsea coating and provide accurate ovality and direct quantitative wall thickness measurements (to a depth sizing ±0.2 mm).
David Parramore, Subsea Engineering and Operations Director, said: “There is nothing else like this currently on the market. ART is particularly suited to underwater inspection because it negates the need for expensive coating and marine growth removal and results in high quality data, even in challenging situations.”
Requiring limited surface preparation and reduced vessel time, the ART vCaliper reduces operational costs, the company said. It easily interfaces with all common ROVs. It is lightweight and uses a magnetic motor-less arc to fasten on the pipe. The tool also provides full 360° coverage around the pipe with simple manipulation by an ROV.
The tool features two transducers that collect data simultaneously with a minimum collection of three readings for ovality.
The current design scope caters for inspection from 6 to 20 in. It can be easily engineered to any diameters required, the company said.
The ART vCaliper was deployed in the Gulf of Mexico along with the company’s MagCrawler, which uses ACFM technology to conduct a combined caliper, wall thickness, and weld inspection in one campaign.
10/05/2021
