Automated Ultrasonic Testing for Mapping and Correlation With ILI Internal Pitting Measurements

This paper presents a methodology for automated ultrasonic inspection of internal corrosion on product pipelines. The automated process replaces the standard manual methods of inspection and uses the ultrasonic ILI tool data to localize the areas of corrosion on the exposed joint. Typically, only the bottom part of the pipe must be inspected due to the predominant damage mechanism being sediment fallout that tends to collect on the bottom of the pipelines producing a corrosive environment. The result is a superior inspection, due to the increased speed, reliability and reproducibility that automated inspection provides. The ultrasonic ILI tool data and the automated ultrasonic data can also be directly compared to each other to provide a quantitative comparison between the two inspection methods. This has shown that the ILI data and the automated ultrasonic data correlated well with regards to the location and overall corrosion dimensions.