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Safety assessment and lifetime Management of industrial Piping Systems

Objective

Our industrial infrastructure is aging affecting society, economy and industry. Risk assessment and lifetime management gains importance with the progressive aging of industrial installations. The overall objective is to develop a complete integrated monitoring system that allows to rate industrial piping systems over their whole service life and to increase the general safety.

The goal is to reduce investment cost for maintenance, inspection and loss of production as well as to limit accidents, hazardous t o mankind and environment. This proposal addresses important industrial lifecycle issues of the nuclear industry and the sector of chemical plants. Current, visual inspection based, methodologies shall be replaced by online sensor and decision support systems. No limit for the assessment throughout the lifecycle shall remain. The conceptual objective is to demonstrate the opportunities for the advanced technology to deliver a radical new approach to the lifecycle control and maintenance of structures. This will be achieved by showcasing the optimisation of piping systems in industrial installations that is enabled through a new rating paradigm for risk assessment, management, maintenance and retrofit. A complete integrated monitoring system will allow to r ate industrial piping systems over the whole service life and to increase the general safety.

One of the main obstacles in pipe monitoring is the existence of non accessible parts of the system, for example if pipes are passing river basins, running subsurface or inside concrete structures. The objective is to use novel technologies like acoustic emission, guided mechanical wave propagation, tomographic imaging and flexible piezoelectric fibre sensors to overcome that obstacle. The fibres are produced in a nanoscale sol-gel process. The goal is to enable the monitoring of non-accessible parts of the piping system to identify critical faults and to localise the damage in the system automatically.

Fields of science

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Call for proposal

FP6-2003-NMP-TI-3-MAIN
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

STREP - Specific Targeted Research Project

Coordinator

VCE HOLDING
Address
Hadikgasse 60
Vienna
Austria

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EU contribution
€ 0,00

Participants (11)

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Last update: 11 January 2010

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Permalink: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/13898

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