In-service wall thickness measurement and corrosion monitoring on assets operating at elevated temperatures — up to 550°C — without shutdown, without cooling, and without the inspection gap that waiting for the next planned outage creates.
Conventional ultrasonic inspection
requires the asset to be taken offline, cooled, and prepared for
ambient-temperature UT before inspection can begin. For continuous process
industries — refineries, chemical plants, power stations, and glass manufacturers
— this constraint does not just impose inspection cost. It defines the
inspection interval, limits condition monitoring frequency, and creates a gap
in the integrity assurance programme that cannot be fully closed by periodic
planned shutdown inspection alone.
High-temperature UT inspection
uses specially designed transducer systems — delay line probes, buffer rod
probes, and piezocomposite high-temperature elements — capable of sustained
contact with surfaces operating at temperatures up to 550°C. Standard pulse-echo
UT thickness measurement is performed at the actual operating surface
temperature, with acoustic velocity correction applied in real time to maintain
measurement accuracy at elevated temperature rather than at ambient calibration
conditions.
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Refinery fired heater tube
thickness monitoring — in-service, between planned outages
•
Pressure vessel shell
monitoring during hot standby and continuous operation
•
Steam drum and boiler wall
thickness monitoring — in-service at operating temperature
•
Reformer and reactor
furnace tube and pressure part monitoring
•
Catalytic cracker (FCCU)
hot wall thickness monitoring
•
Glass furnace steel shell
inspection at operating temperature
•
Chemical reactor,
autoclave, and high-temperature pressure vessel monitoring
•
Cement kiln and rotary kiln
shell thickness monitoring
•
ASME Section V — Article 23
(SE-797) — Standard Guide for Measuring Thickness of Metallic Materials by
Contact Pulse-Echo Method at Temperatures up to 550°C
•
API 510 — Pressure Vessel
Inspection Code — in-service inspection requirements and alternative inspection
methods
•
API 570 — Piping Inspection
Code — thickness measurement and corrosion monitoring requirements
•
API 579 / ASME FFS-1 —
Fitness-for-service assessment — thinning assessment using in-service thickness
data
•
ASME B31.3 — Process Piping
— high-temperature service inspection considerations
•
Client and
operator-specific high-temperature corrosion monitoring procedures and minimum
thickness criteria