Designing Real-Time Radioscopic Inspection Systems to Access Piping Integrity

摘要

Due to severe corrosion problems that occurred much earlier in the life of the Prudhoe Bay oil fields than was expected, a method to economically identify areas of corrosion in hundreds of miles of transportation piping became an urgent need in the early years of the 1980s. Since production in the above-ground, insulated lines ranging in diameter from four to forty-two inches (10 to 107 cm) could not be interrupted or the insulation removed, conventional inspection techniques did not offer a solution. Through a series of developmental programs, a radiographic method was established that was able to locate and quantify the pitting corrosion and thereby determine the integrity of the damaged piping. ' This provided a basis for the later development of automated, or Real-Time, Radioscopy. The early real-time radioscopic systems were introduced on the North Slope in the mid-1980s. These systems utilized image capture devices developed for the medical industry carried down the horizontal piping by motorized crawlers coupled with microcomputer-based image enhancement and control systems. Limitations inherent with the image capture devices, the motor control and mechanical units, and microcomputers of that time have been greatly minimized by significant advances in all three areas over the last decade. The transformation of these early systems into the rugged, durable real-time radioscopic equipment used today will be outlined in this paper.