Objective
Over 10m kIn of pipelines in Europe carry hazardous fluids including oil, oil products, chemicals and gases; they are subjected to corrosion by the environmentand contents and, in some cases, mechanical fatigue. Failure to inspect them can result in leakage of hazardous material into the environment and even explosion. Up to 90% of these pipelines are inaccessible for inspection by current inspection methods because these are: (1) Buried under concrete. (2) Buried underground. (3) Underwater or (4) Covered with coatings. Due to undetected leakages, in Europe up to 4m gallons of oil are leaked into the environment per year. The consortium SMEs propose to develop a set of mechanised inspection techniques, sensors and systems for finding defects and corrosion in pipe, which is inaccessible to the operator (ie pipes buried underground, in concrete in water or covered with coatings such as thick paint or insulation) without the need to """"dig up"""" or remove coatings. By developing this technology; the consortium SMEs will access the 250 million Euro per annum, pipeline and pipework inspection budget of World Oil & gas, chemical and electricity plant operator companies, 4 years after project completion. The economic objectives are: (1) A significant reduction in the cost of inspection. Europe wide saving of 200 million Euros is expected 4 years after project completion. (2) A reduction in the number of spillages and subsequent product losses and clean-up costs. (3) Profits from sales of the inspection systems and inspection service (approx 7m Euro bver 4 years). The social objectives are: (1) Elimination of hazard due to possible exposure of workers to asbestos used for older pipe insulation. (2) Elimination of hazard due to working on hot surfaces. (3) Elimination of labour intensive and monotonous inspection tasks. The environmental objectives are elimination/reduction of spillages of hazardous fluids and contamination of water supplies and pollution of natural habitats."
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- engineering and technologymaterials engineeringcoating and films
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringsensors
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesenvironmental sciencespollution
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Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
Cooperative - SMEs-Co-operative research contractsCoordinator
EASTBOURNE, E SUSSEX
United Kingdom