Vehicle for the detection of stress corrosion cracking in buried gas pipelines

Technical Report · Wed Sep 06 04:00:00 EDT 1989

OSTI ID:6002135

Barton, A B; Pope, C W; Card, K J

Stress corrosion cracking poses a serious threat to aging underground cathodically protected gas pipelines. As coatings deteriorate, local conditions conducive to corrosion and stress corrosion cracking become more common. During the last decade, there have been several ruptures in various places throughout the worked attributed to SCC. One of the most important steps in combating failure by stress corrosion cracking is to perform regular, reliable and cost effective monitoring of the pipelines. Current methods available including hydrotesting and MPI are expensive, time consuming, not conductive to regular testing and are not entirely reliable. Regular testing of pipes will improve understanding of stress corrosion of cracking, initiation, propagation and tolerance. This report describes the present state of development of the ultrasonic pipe inspection vehicle being jointly developed by C.W. Pope and Associates and the Centre for Industrial Control Sciences at the University of Newcastle, Australis. The present aim is the evaluation of unpressurized pipelines to record areas of stress corrosion cracking (SSC) at relatively low cost and with minimum sophistication. The several independent areas of the project are rapidly converging together in preparation for the field trials in November. These areas include wheel probe development, signal processing development, hardware development, radio modem communication and software development. Each of these areas are individually addressed in this report.

• Research Organization: Pope (C.W.) and Associates, Georgetown (Australia)
• Sponsoring Organization: AGA; American Gas Association, Inc., Arlington, VA (United States)
• OSTI ID: 6002135
• Report Number(s): PR-198-808
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

03 NATURAL GAS
032000* -- Natural Gas-- Transport
Handling
& Storage
36 MATERIALS SCIENCE
360105 -- Metals & Alloys-- Corrosion & Erosion
42 ENGINEERING
420500 -- Engineering-- Materials Testing
ACOUSTIC TESTING
CHEMICAL REACTIONS
CONTROL
CORROSION
CRACKS
DOCUMENT TYPES
ENERGY SOURCES
FLUIDS
FOSSIL FUELS
FUEL GAS
FUELS
GAS FUELS
GASES
INSPECTION
MATERIALS TESTING
NATURAL GAS
NONDESTRUCTIVE TESTING
PIPELINES
PROGRESS REPORT
REMOTE CONTROL
STRESS CORROSION
TESTING
ULTRASONIC TESTING