ESR Technology wins Best Paper Award at this year’s British Non Destructive Testing Conference

Warrington, UK. ESR Technology, one of the UK’s leading engineering services providers, announced today that it has won the prestigious Best Paper Award at this year’s Annual British Conference on Non-Destructive Testing (NDT), organised by the British Institute of NDT.

The paper entitled, “Multi-skip TOFD: a quantitative technique for the measurement of wall loss in inaccessible components” was presented at the event in Stratford-upon-Avon earlier this month. It was amongst more than eighty papers presented during the three day conference that covered a broad range of NDT technologies and applications.

The paper’s lead author, Dr Steve Burch, is Head of ESR Technology’s Inspection Technology Department.

Paper demonstrates a new approach to measuring inaccessible pipe components in the oil and gas sector

In the oil and gas industry, many regions have issues with the maintenance of ageing plant. One particular challenge is inspection for corrosion in areas of pipes and vessels rendered inaccessible by obstructions such as supports, clamps and saddles. Visual inspection by removing clamps or lifting a pipe off its support is extremely costly and time consuming so there is increasing interest in methods which allow inspection of these areas in-situ. Current ultrasonic techniques are however limited and do not provide accurate information on the through-wall extent of the corrosion, which is key to making decisions on the need to repair and continued safe operation of the plant.

Dr Burch’s paper describes a new, advanced ultrasonic technique which uses two high-resolution probes placed on either side of the obstruction. Sophisticated analysis of the signals measured by this technique can give invaluable quantitative information on the extent of the wall loss with accuracies as high as ±1mm in some cases. This technique has the potential for large cost savings if it shows negligible levels of corrosion as the need to remove clamps or lift pipes off supports for visual inspection is then avoided.

This development was initially funded by the HOIS2000 Joint Industry Project, which is managed by ESR Technology. The current membership comprises sixteen companies, which range from the oil and gas majors to inspection services providers and inspection equipment vendors. HOIS2000 carries out a broad range of projects with the overall aim of improved inspection for the oil and gas industry. A subsequent successful evaluation trial was funded by Shell Global Solutions International and two of their staff co-authored the paper.

“The inspection of inaccessible regions of pipes and structures presents a real challenge to operators of oil and gas plants,” said Geoff Eckold, Engineering Director of ESR Technology. “The development of new inspection methods such as skipping-TOFD provide a key contribution to integrity management. The NDT’s annual conference represents an important forum for the NDT community and ESR Technology was delighted with Steve’s best-paper award.