Directional Caliper Tool Development

TransCanada owns and operates more than 91,500km of natural gas pipelines in North America and since 2014 they’ve been aggressively pursuing the assessment of the unpigged portion of their system. To expand the In-Line Inspection coverage in the system TransCanada identified the need to develop a bi-directional caliper tool. This development allowed TransCanada to attain both Magnetic Flux Leakage and Caliper data while reducing the overall cost of its multi-year baseline assessment program. This paper will discuss the technical features of the bi-directional caliper tool and an overview of the model used by TransCanada which drove the development of the bi-directional caliper technology and to demonstrate the advantages of utilizing unconventional In Line Inspection technology in order to obtain MFL and Caliper data.