Structural Health Monitoring of Localized Internal Corrosion in High Temperature Piping for Oil Industry

Crude oil is becoming more corrosive with higher sulfur concentration, chloride concentration, and acidity. The increasing presence of naphthenic acids in oils with various environmental conditions at temperatures between 150 degrees C and 400 degrees C can lead to different internal degradation morphologies in refineries that are uniform, non-uniform, or localized pitting. Improved corrosion measurement technology is needed to better quantify the integrity risk associated with refining crude oils of higher acid concentration. This paper first reports a consolidated review of corrosion inspection technology to establish the foundation for structural health monitoring of localized internal corrosion in high temperature piping. An approach under investigation is to employ flexible ultrasonic thin-film piezoelectric transducer arrays fabricated by the solgel manufacturing process for monitoring localized internal corrosion at temperatures up to 400 degrees C. A statistical analysis of sol-gel transducer measurement accuracy using various time of flight thickness calculation algorithms on a flat calibration block is demonstrated.