ClampOn won a Spotlight award last year—now its corrosion erosion monitoring system is taking off.
Corrosion erosion is seeing increased interest in the subsea sector, both on old and new developments.
It is proving a growing business area for ClampOn. The privately-owned company was set up in 1994 and now employs 90 people in Bergen, Norway and 15 in Houston, Texas.
It has become a major supplier of passive ultrasonic systems for sand/particle monitoring to the international oil and gas sector using Digital Signal Processing (DSP)—complete digitalization that eliminates analogue filters, circuits, and amplifiers.
All the company’s products us the same technology, both topside and subsea, and includesparticle monitors, pig detectors, leak monitoring, and ClampOn’s new corrosion erosion monitoring (CEM) equipment.
After receiving the OTC Spotlight on new Technology last year, the company has won its first orders for its subsea CEM and several units are expected to be installed by the end of this year.
The CEM measures and monitors wall thickness loss in pipes, plates or other metal structures. It has up to 32 transducers on a CEM unit and an electronics unit to handle all signal acquisition and processing.
This means wall thickness trends are generated automatically and can be observed in real-time on a computer, running CEM software or logged internally in a data logger.
The units can be ROV-installed for existing pipes and structures or pre-installed before structures are submerged.
A growing area of use for DSP is in vibration measurement in subsea facilities, including around flow-induced vibration in pipework, said Dag A. Aldal, president of ClampOn.
“Vibration-induced fatigue problems on subsea installations have received increasing attention during recent years,” he said.
“Several existing subsea installations are coming of age, and new fields are being developed with higher flow velocities, and also otherwise under more challenging conditions.
“Vibration-induced fatigue damages may well cause serious incidents, and continuous integrity management is becoming increasingly important.
“Flow-induced vibration excitation of pipework has been identified as a significant source of risk, and is included among design considerations for new plants.”
To address the issue, ClampOn has added sensitive, three-dimensional accelerometry to its subsea sensors in combination with a significant upgrade in signal processing power.
This enables the subsea 3D Vibration Monitoring system to offer real time, three-dimensional vibration monitoring across a wide frequency spectrum.
It can carry out tasks from automated on-line monitoring to vibration inspection and characterization testing.
In 2012, the firm completed the development of a magnetic version of the tool, so that it could be installed on existing infrastructure where traditional mechanical installation means are not possible, or are time consuming and expensive.
The system was first tested in the Gulf of Mexico in 2011 after an operator had experienced several choke insert failures. The test installation revealed that the vibration and choke insert failure was due to an unaccounted for vibration, occurring at a specific production rate.
The final version was deployed for the first time in 2012, when an operator experienced a chatter problem with a 28in. valve. The monitor was installed in an existing torque-tool and held in place by a magnetic clamp. It measured the valve chatter, allowing the operator to identify the production rates at which this occurred. They were thereby able to avoid these rates and thus eliminate vibration in the structure.
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