Materials Performance

MAY 2017

Materials Performance is the world's most widely circulated magazine dedicated to corrosion prevention and control. MP provides information about the latest corrosion control technologies and practical applications for every industry and environment.

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52 MAY 2017 MATERIALS PERFORMANCE NACE INTERNATIONAL: VOL. 56, NO. 5 MATERIALS SELECTION & DESIGN T Online corrosion monitoring is an in- tegral part of any effective pipeline integrity management system that ensures the reliability of the estab- lished pipeline network. Corrosion monitoring techniques can be classi- fied as intrusive and nonintrusive methods. Implementation of nonin- trusive corrosion monitoring technol- ogies will provide flexibility in select- ing the monitoring locations. This article discusses the laborator y findings from a laboratory assessment of a n o n i n t r u s i v e c o r r o s i o n m o n i t o r i n g technique based on electric field mapping (EFM) under field simulated conditions. For comparison purposes, the ultrasonic testing (U T) technique was utilized to validate EFM results. Corrosion is known to threaten the operations and integrity of pipelines and other assets in the oil and gas industry, 1-2 leading to failures impacting the health and s afety, env ironm ent, an d c o st c on se - quences, as well as negative impacts on cus- tomers due to downtime in operations. Although carbon steel (CS) is the industry's choice material for pipelines due to its excellent mechanical properties, weldabil- ity, and low cost, 3 it is susceptible to differ- ent c orro sion d ama ge m e chani sm s. 4-5 Therefore, corrosion monitoring programs should be implemented to monitor corro- sion and effectively manage these lines. The current corrosion monitoring practice in the oil and gas industry is to install intru- sive online probes or coupons as tools to evaluate and monitor f luid corrosivity. These corrosion monitoring techniques include electrochemical noise, 6-7 electrical resistance, 8-9 ring pair electrical resistance sensors, 10 linear polarization resistance, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, 11 multi-electrode array systems, 12 and weight loss coupons. 13 Corrosion coupons are labor-intensive and do not provide early warning. Also, coupons need to be removed manually to calculate the corrosion rate. In addition, the selection of the intrusive cor- rosion monitoring techniques should con- sider the type of the exposed environments (i.e., sour or sweet environments). There- fore, the need to use nonintrusive online corrosion monitoring techniques becomes an important tool as part of an effective pipeline integrity management system. It enables field operations to detect changes in corrosion behavior, enable timely reme- dial action to be taken, eliminate unplanned plant shutdowns, diagnose a particular cor- rosion problem, assess the effectiveness of the ongoing treatment chemicals program, and improve equipment life. There are different nonintrusive tech- niques such as ultrasonic testing (UT) and fiber-optic sensor (FOS) 14 in addition to EFM. This work will focus mainly on the utilization of the EFM technique, which can cover a bigger area compared to FOS and can provide online readings, where UT provides spot readings only. EFM is a non- Testing and Validation of Advanced Corrosion Monitoring Technology Bander F. a L d aa J ani, n aye F M. a L anazi, a .M. e L - s herik, and a B du LL ati F i . a B du L h adi, Saudi Aramco, Research & Development Center, Saudi Aramco, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

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