Increased Measurement Reliability for Pipeline Inspection in Energy and Petrochemical Plants
Radiographic inspections of pipelines as part of the on-stream inspection are a common NDT inspection technique in power and petrochemical plants for the determination of residual wall thicknesses. The corresponding measured values from the images are essential information that must be fed into asset management systems (IDMS, AIM, RBI, ...) to verify the integrity or the exact replacement date of the pipeline component.
Radiographs have no length information directly after they are taken and must always be calibrated prior to measurement to assign a number of image pixels to a distance. In addition, the images of pipelines are usually also a projection and the pipe section is magnified by the imaging process. This means that the image must be calibrated in order to obtain "correct" measurements. Since conventional calibration methods, e.g. using a measuring ball, are not really accurate in our opinion, we have developed an automated image calibration and automated pipe wall measurement in the DIMATE evaluation workstation. Here, the DIMATE system detects the pipe walls at the desired position based on the algorithms we have developed, and using the known outside diameter of the pipe, the image can be very accurately calibrated and the wall thickness determined.
With the specialized functionality of the DIMATE evaluation workstation and the end-to-end digitization of the entire inspection process with the DIMATE PACS system, Asset Integrity Management systems finally receive the inspection data quality required for sustainable asset management. In addition, the time required to evaluate inspection images is significantly reduced (up to 70% time savings).