Public Funding for Micha Design Company Limited(The)

Corrosion in pipelines costs the Oil & Gas sector millions of pounds in clean-up, maintenance and litigation. Guided Wave systems are used to conduct long range inspections of pipelines to detect corrosion remotely, particularly in inaccessible areas. There is a requirement from the industry to monitor the health of pipeline infrastructure and a trend towards ascertaining holistic coverage whilst increasing the probability of detection. In order to achieve this, a new generation of Guided Wave monitoring systems needs to be created. Previous generations of Guided Wave systems are inspection orientated, with the need for service engineers making scheduled inspections and manually assessing the data. This collaborative R&D project aims to develop a modularised Guided Wave monitoring sub assembly part containing on-board power and communications, which could be synchronised to produce a distributed monitoring network. This would provide more frequent information regarding the health of the infrastructure and flag up incipient corrosion and the appropriate locations for further targeted labour-intensive inspection.