Traditionally, operators used to rely on skilled personnel to constantly be on the ground at the facility, recording tedious data points to maintain and ensure safe operations manually. Such monitoring activities require high labour cost and time, leaving operators to heavily rely on manual data collection, in which some can be difficult due to access and subject to human errors. This challenge is aggravated in view of the current pandemic, when travel and presence of skilled personnel at site is restricted.
In recent years, with the development of smart sensors and high volume of data transmission and storage, remote monitoring technologies have been developed to offer real-time data, remote access and diagnostics, which reduce and eliminate the need for long manhours in inspection, maintenance and operational down-time. This, in turn, provides a huge savings in time and cost to the operators by not only maintaining and operating more efficiently, but also eliminating the risk of having failures and costly unscheduled repairs at their facilities.
As a company that constantly searches for cost and time savings solutions, IEV is providing a suite of remote monitoring solutions to the O&G industry through three (3) digital solutions:
1. Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of Offshore Platforms (INDIA Only):
Poseidon is a technology developed by UTP, Malaysia which provides structural sensory arrays and data acquisition systems for structural health monitoring purposes. It is integrated via a software platform which incorporates research solutions to ease decision makings in maintaining structural integrity. The system is built in accordance to the industrial practices and standards.
The primary benefits of Poseidon™ are to provide real-time information of global, structural integrity or isolated defects, reduce dependency on manned personnel to perform inspection, in particular underwater locations, and optimise maintenance programs to condition-based rather than time-based inspection.
2. Non-intrusive Monitoring of Corrosion and Erosion Rates
Since its establishment on 1997 in Norway, Sensorlink has been delivering non-intrusive wall thickness measurement instruments for the monitoring of corrosion and erosion rates for onshore and subsea pipelines, through its PipeMonit and UltraMonit technologies . Corrosion assessment of assets can be monitored remotely in real time, allowing corrosion control engineers to provide fast response to arrest unexpected excessive corrosion attack.
The outstanding features of Sensorlink are:
- Its highly accurate and direct wall thickness measurements and repeatability provide operators with unprecedented level of reliable corrosion/erosion rate data, and
- Local data processing eliminates the need for CMS software and data can be integrated in any existing report format. Data can be downloaded or transmitted by simple Bluetooth or wireless infrastructure at site.
3. Remote Monitoring and controlling of Cathodic Protection (CP) systems
While Sensorlink technology enables monitoring of internal corrosion rate, over the last decade, Omniflex has developed a wide range of CP products and solutions, under the PowerView CP brand to monitor performance of CP systems and external corrosion. This includes installation of large scale fully distributed CP systems for assets ranging from mega size ports and terminals to specific pipelines and storage tanks.
The PowerView CP system can apply to both new and existing CP systems with hundreds of zones of monitoring and controlling. Recently, PowerView CP is designed to monitor both galvanic and Impressed Current cathodic protection systems, and offers remote monitoring and controlling with an integrated data storage and reporting that delivers a single framework for all CP assets, regardless of their vintage and vendors.
In trend with technology digitalisation, all of the above-mentioned remote monitoring solutions can also be integrated or programmed to provide notifications or alerts on specific data or readings exceeding the allowable parameters set as required. Users can also access specific data as desired from the facility at their own work-desk or mobile devices via cloud-based connections.
The digitalisation of technologies allows IEV and its technology partners to implement solutions that provide accurate conditional assessments of assets, providing customers with reliable and real-time data to make critical and timely decisions to protect their assets at a fraction of conventional inspection costs and time.