25.01.2023

New Patent for ClampOn Corrosion-Erosion Monitor

ClampOn has been granted patent in USA for a lightweight tomographic processing algorithm for wall thickness mapping using the ClampOn CEM® (Corrosion-Erosion Monitor). Patents are pending in UK and Norway for the same technology.

The ClampOn CEM® transmits guided Lamb waves across an area of pipe wall, monitoring the local mean wall thickness loss between pairs of transmitting and receiving transducers. The CorrPRINT^TM software has been available for several years as an option to provide advanced 3D wall thickness mapping of the area monitored by the CEM®.

*Illustrating signal paths between two pairs of transducers*

The new lightweight tomographic algorithm supplements the CEM® ecosystem with simpler wall thickness mapping. This can be applied interactively to gain additional insight from historical data as well as in real time, typically for CEM® installations that were not dimensioned for fully-fledged CorrPRINT^TM tomographic monitoring. The small computational load also makes the new algorithm suitable for implementation in simple and rugged stand-alone systems where computing power must be balanced with reliability and energy consumption.

Mean wall-loss data from partially overlapping signal paths between transmitting and receiving transducers are combined to generate a two-dimensional map.
Figures: Left; four paths, four segments (A-D) Centre; two paths, three segments (E-G) Right; a geometry with 16 paths and 213 segments. *The color scale indicates numbering of the segments*

A ClampOn Corrosion-Erosion CEM can monitor changes in wall thickness over a large area of a pipeline. The non-intrusive instrument estimates the rate at which corrosion and/or erosion reduces the thickness of the pipe wall. In this way, it can provide operators with an early warning of potential catastrophic failures before they occur.