Flare Stack Guy Wire and Wire Rope Inspection

From flare stack guy wires to suspender cables on bridges, cable-stay, and post-tension tendons, the various steel cables are critical to maintaining infrastructures worldwide.

Often hidden within the cross-section of the cables is a catastrophe waiting to happen, be it a post-tensioned tendon, cable-stay, or guy wire, the internal corrosion may have little correlation with the visual condition of the exterior of the cables and until now manual visual inspections have been the only way to inspect.

Portable, Wireless, and Accurate. The unit effortlessly clamps on to the guy wire and quickly travels up the wire transmitting data to a base unit below.

A robotic non-destructive guy wire and wire rope inspection service has been developed to produce condition assessments of the corrosive condition of wire ropes in flare stack guy wires as well as other wire ropes in various infrastructure components.

Infraspect robotic wire rope inspection services utilize magnetic flux leakage to peer through the external HDPE sheathing to locate loss of metallic area inside the guy or any wire rope.

Infraspect’s robotic service is an autonomous tool that consists of a crawler that is towing a magnetizing sensor head and a portable computer that wirelessly controls both. The service both looks at and videos the outside of the rope as well as measures the loss of cross-sectional metallic area along with a guy or wire rope.

A guy–wire, guy-line, or guy-rope, also known as simply a guy, is a tensioned cable designed to add stability to a free-standing structure.

They are used commonly in ship masts, radio masts, wind turbines, utility poles, and more.

Wire ropes are used in everything from post-tensioned tendons to suspender cables on bridges, ski lifts, cranes, hoists, and more.

Guyed towers, Cable Stays, Post Tension Tendons, and other wire ropes up to 3000 feet tall, structurally support many many of our critical infrastructure assets worldwide.

These structural support wires are in critical need of reliable corrosion inspection, quantifiable corrosion control, effective structural assessment, and realistic prioritization of wire rope and guy wire replacement.

There is a desperate need for Improved Inspection Methods for Wire rope and Guy Corrosion.

Current visual methods are manual and subjective in nature, they do not have the ability to properly advise asset owners of the condition of their wire ropes.

How to fix our nation’s bridges using the latest in robotic nondestructive testing is explained.

Because internal wires are more active in tension than the outer wires detection of corrosion on internal wires is critical.

If one corroded guy fails from localized corrosion hidden deep within an otherwise perfectly good guy, a slender tower can easily buckle, collapse, and bring down nearby towers in the multi-tower antenna arrays. Current tower industry protocol calls for a qualitative visual inspection of the
the external surface of each guy using a high-powered scope.

However, quantitative measurements of the interior of the structural strand are essential for prioritizing guy replacements, estimating
remaining guy life, developing guy retirement criteria and reducing the risk of mission interruption.

Traditional Magnetic Flux Leakage for Wire Rope Inspection Service
Since 1970, Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) devices have been used for quantitative inspection of wire rope, principally for improving the safety of mine hoisting operations.

The primary reason for the retirement of running wire rope has been wire breaks and other Local Flaws (LF), caused mostly by running and repeatedly bending over sheaves.
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NDT devices with magnetic flux leakage technology have evolved as the preferred technology for inspection of wire rope and other similar structures.

Infraspect’s marriage of NDT (Nondestructive Testing) technology, robotics, and software has brought about a new generation of robotic infrastructure inspection services for wire ropes and guy wires.

For wire rope inspection, the rope generally runs through a stationary magnetizing sensor head. For application on a stationary guy, a moving inspection tool must travel along and high up a stationary guy.

Infraspect’s development of RopeScan® a Magnetizing Sensor Head combined with robotics and specialized software is the future of wire rope and guy wire inspection and safety.

Hinged and clamped around a guy, the magnetizing sensor head was built to accommodate a variety of magnetic sensing options. The key to the accuracy of the tool is sufficient magnetic saturation of the guy cross-section with respect to the chosen type of magnetic sensor. Better magnetic sensing requires less magnetic saturation, which leads to a smaller assemblage of rare earth magnets, which leads to a lighter tool that is more easily handled and hauled up and down a guy or wire rope.

The accuracy of the head is evaluated or calibrated on the bench per standard rod. The unit can locate substantially less than 1 wire break within a strand.  This is much lower than would cause the replacement of a wire rope.

Repeating this inspection during subsequent inspections will cause you to know the deterioration progression over time enabling you to replace the wire rope prior to it becoming a danger.

LMA readings on several of the guys on transmission towers, particularly those guys scheduled for replacement in the near future. We then plan to compare these NDT measurements with destructively obtained forensic results and evaluate the overall fidelity of the device for measuring actual internal guy corrosion. This baseline inspection data and its comparison to forensic information will permit us to develop a reliable process for assessing the remaining life and/or risk of failure for each guy, based on a reliable quantifiable measure of maximum corrosion along with each guy.

Robotic Flare Stack Guy Wire Inspection Service

A gas flare, also known as a flare stack, is a gas combustion device that is used in industrial plants such as petroleum refineries, chemical plants, and natural gas processing plants as well as at oil or gas production sites having oil wells, gas wells, offshore oil and gas rigs as well as landfills.

A flare stack or what’s known as a gas flare is a tall vertical vent pipe used in petroleum refineries as well as petrochemical plants, chemical plants, as well as natural gas processing plants in order to burn off flammable gas released by the pressure relief valves during unplanned over-pressuring of plant equipment.

RopeScan® is a robotic wire rope inspection service that locates loss of metallic area in wire ropes. Guy wire ropes are not accepting ion. It is recommended that Flare stack guy wire ropes should be inspected every 18-24 months. These inspections are mostly visual or by drone.  Visual inspections are just that visual and cannot help in determining issues and deterioration inside the wire strands.

Robotic Wire Rope Inspection Service

Infraspect, Infraspect spent 6 years developing what is now the latest in wire rope inspection services. RopeScan® peers through steel cables to find corrosion or loss of metallic area.  At the same time, it conducts a visual inspection of the exterior of the cable looking for broken or splitting wires.  No bucket trucks or man lifts are required. The inspections are safer and provide asset owners with more quantitative data than ever seen before.

Know when to replace your wire rope. Send your scope of work below and we will call you with details and pricing.

CONCLUSIONS

Magnetic flux leakage technology is an excellent choice for measuring the loss of metallic cross-sectional area in the structural strand of wire ropes, tower guys, and other critical wire ropes.