Corrosion and erosion on subsea installations is a big challenge for oil and gas operators and can carry significant cost and risk. Better monitoring of seabed installations will lower maintenance costs, provide greater control and reduce risk to installation integrity. For topside installations, there are several methods of inspection and monitoring available, but subsea, the challenge has been to find technology that works and provides real value. The growing number of aging subsea installations increases the need for good retrofit solutions. Research and development of guided-wave methods for asset monitoring and screening has been ongoing for several years and over this time ClampOn has developed a non-invasive instrument which can be used on new subsea installations or retrofitted by ROV to existing installations. While developing this guided wave based system, ClampOn's research team has worked in parallel to develop and implement more technology in the system which will provide high-resolution 3D data for the area being monitored. Tomography is already used elsewhere, such as in medical applications, but has never before been used as part of a fixed subsea system to monitor wall thickness loss in pipelines.
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