Pipeline Interacting Threats

Interacting Threats describe a situation in which one threat is interacting with another, oftentimes resulting in damages that are exponentially greater than if each threat was experienced separately.

The first of these threats are Time Dependent Threats. They’re caused by forces including external corrosion, internal corrosion, and stress corrosion cracking.

The second of these threats are Time-Independent Threats. These are threats caused by nature (i.e., earthquakes) or by people (i.e., construction vehicles hitting your pipeline, vandalism, or letting unknown anomalies progress to the point of catastrophic failure).

The third and final of these threats are called Stable Threats. These threats – for the most part – are associated with the construction and/or maintenance of the pipeline itself. Things like defective pipe seams or manufacturing defects are included in this category of threats.

Up-close view of a injurious pipeline feature

When two or more of these threats interact with one another, the potential injuriousness is substantial. The challenge with detecting these threats, though, is that that there are almost innumerable different ways that one kind of feature can interact with another. NDT Global overcomes this challenge by providing customized ILI inspection campaigns and services designed to bring clarity and informed decision making.

For example, the diagnosis of cracks in dents requires the combination of two different inline inspection technologies, ultrasonic geometry and ultrasonic crack inspections. In the instance of circumferential defects, a combination of ultrasonic circumferential crack and INS inspections could expose dormant girth weld integrity threats. And for each of these scenarios, there also needs to be a customized analysis method developed to interpret the data to provide the actionable insights our customers need to identify and mitigate the multitude of potential interacting threats they may be experiencing. While the challenge of determining how to inspect these interacting threats and providing the insights required to manage them seems daunting, NDT Global has made it our business to be the best at doing exactly that.