A system approach for cost-effective corrosion controls by incorporating corrosion management into a company’s existing systems. It will improve communication, resourcing, and funding allocation such that corrosion control investments result in positive returns while minimizing costly failures.

One of the pillars of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) is to let machines make decisions on behalf of humans; this paper describes new technology that allows machines to decide inspection programs and field validation and testing of results. The technology described is a part of integrity management, and uses data, statistics and expert decisions to design inspection programs. These inspection programs are an important part of the safeguarding of equipment to maintain production and safety.
This technology is a data-driven predictive model of material loss from corrosion, based on domain expert input and historical data in the form of non-destructive testing (NDT) tests. The technology trends is based on historical data and SME input, while accounting for uncertainties in NDT measurements, with uncertainties in historical trends and uncertainties in future trends. This produces a more realistic failure prediction to enhance existing RBIs and adds safety by improving on early detection of trends in data. In total, this enables the machine to update inspection plans autonomously, reducing the number of inspections significantly.
The paper also describes how the technology can be developed further to use production data and integrity operating windows to improve predictions, deal with localised corrosion and assess if the test points on a corrosion circuit are sufficient, can be reduced in number or should be manually evaluated by adding more test points.

There is a gap between the Integrity management systems used by companies to manage their assets and the needs of the CP engineer. Integrity management systems do not fully meet the needs of the engineer responsible for corrosion as they do not provide access and visualizations of all the data the engineer needs to make fast and informed decisions. There is also often no easy way to see the trends in the data, or easily access the relevant video and photographic data also recorded during the survey.

Data from surveys is normally contained in reports and EXCEL spreadsheets often with different measurement locations and inconsistent naming of the locations between reports. In this paper a system is introduced which enables engineers to manage and visualise in 3D CP survey data and provide access to all the relevant information through a 3D visual interface to any member of the teams. The software gives the engineer the ability to visualize in 3D the historical and predicted CP protection on the structure and the status of the anodes in the CP system. It also provides information on long term trends in the survey data.

By integrating the corrosion data with a simulation model a “digital twin” of the structure can be created to make predictions of the present and future protection of all parts of the structure. For example the engineer can easily use the software to systematically monitor the differences between the model predictions and survey data to identify anomalies and give early identification of problems which will require action.

The paper will describe the system developed and present applications of both the 3D corrosion data visualisation and the simulation based digital twin