Learn more about how Rosemount Wireless Permasense systems continuously monitor for metal loss
Rosemount systems are permanently installed corrosion monitoring solutions, designed to operate without maintenance for years in inhospitable environments. They combine unique ultrasonic sensors which continuously measure pipe thickness, and gateways receive the thickness data from the sensors via wireless transmission. This provides ongoing visibility of corrosion / erosion trends in real-time. Rosemount offers systems for compact-area facilities, such as refineries and platforms, and wider-area facilities, such as production fields.
Permanent installation of sensors enables much higher quality wall thickness measurements, by eliminating the multiple sources of error associated with manual inspection. The measurement frequency of any individual sensor can also be reprogrammed at any time. With a measurement frequency of twice per day the corrosion/erosion rate can be determined quickly and accurately, within 0.1 mm/yr.
The measurements from one location over a number of months confirms that there is no metal loss – no corrosion or erosion.
If at a remote location, such as a crude overhead line, this indicates that expensive access does not have to be arranged for manual inspection before the next turnaround. If at a location where the risk of corrosion was uncertain, this could indicate there is scope to increase feed TAN levels.
This example of measurements from a single sensor location over a number of months confirms metal loss is at a consistent rate. This enables forecasting of wall thickness if process conditions, inhibition strategy and feedback are kept unchanged.
This example shows no metal loss from August to December, followed by the onset of corrosion, illustrating the value of knowing when that happened - the change can be correlated with changes in potential corrosion drivers, such as process conditions, inhibition strategy and feedstock.
A continuous picture of the rate gives valuable feedback on the impact of operating decisions on the plant. This example displays the impact of changes in crude blend and corrections to inhibitor use in response.
These short range systems work for facilities where the sensors will be within a third of a mile from the network access point. Example shown: Refinery, petrochemical, or onshore production facility
The sensor radios form a mesh network, ensuring that each sensor has multiple connections, and therefore multiple signal paths. This has numerous advantages: a direct line of sight is not required from every location to the gateway, the radio range between individual sensors is multiplied so that locations to be monitored can be hundreds of yards from the gateway, and redundant signal paths ensure robust communication.
The gateway is connected to the customer data network, and converts the data stream to TCP/IP format so that it can flow to the server on the network hosting the Permasense software suite. The data is securely stored in the database and can be viewed with the Permasense Data Manager from any PC on the same customer network or readily exported from the database.
