Augmenting ILI tools to assess external coating

摘要

Coatings used to protect oil and natural gas pipelines can degrade over time, enabling corrosion and stress-corrosion cracksnto initiate and grow. Pipeline companies use in-line inspection (ILI) tools to detect these anomalies, and repair methods tonmitigate the result of a failed coating. The following article describes a project which developed inspection sensors that couldnprevent these anomalies from occurring by monitoring the integrity of the external protective coating of the pipeline. Thisncoating assessment can be performed during typical ILI and will help pipeline owners assess the general health of the coatingnprotecting their pipeline system. A goal of the design was to keep these sensors simple so that an implementation would notnadd substantial cost or complexity to a typical magnetic flux leakage (MFL) or caliper survey.