2020 NACE Paper

Corrosion Data Management Using 3D Visualisation and a Digital Twin

By Robert Adey, Cristina Peratta, John Baynham, Tim Froome

Tim will be presenting a paper discussing how a Corrosion Data Management system combined with a Digital Twin simulation can provide the data engineers need to make fast and informed decisions.

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 decisions. There is also often no easy way to see the trends in the data, or easily access relevant video and photographic data 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. Engineers are then able to visualize the historical and predicted CP protection on the structure and the status of the anodes in the CP system, and to evaluate 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. Differences between the model predictions and survey data can be systematically monitored in order 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.

Images, videos and reports can be viewed within the system

Digital Twin predictions can be viewed with the inspection data