Use Case | Visual Corrosion Monitoring

Through the implementation of Sentinel, we can offer industry a method of measuring and reporting the actual corrosion rate occurring within the process equipment at actual operating conditions. Field data proves and illustrates how significant the deviation between traditional corrosion rate measurement and actual conditions can be.  Knowing corrosion rates at operating conditions is critical when evaluating treatment methods and operational or maintenance planning.  Run time between turn arounds is becoming longer which makes reliability of cooling water exchangers even more critical.  It is imperative to planning, efficiency and operational reliability to abandon antiquated testing methods and embrace new technology for corrosion monitoring and begin taking into account the actual corrosion rates instead of much lower estimates provided by our traditional methods.

One of our deployed locations was experiencing mineral deposition and under-deposit pitting corrosion in excess of 0.30” deep. Over a 2-year period results have been improved significantly and a number of additional uses for this tool have been identified:

• Mineral deposition eliminated
• Localized pit depths reduced 98.7% (current maximum pit 0.004”).
• Evidence of effective system passivation following a turnaround.
• Visual impact of microbiological excursions on heat transfer surfaces following the loss of oxidant feed.
• As an online visual tool to determine the effectiveness of system cleanup following a bacteria excursion and a method to clearly identify how long a clean-up protocol should be run.
• Sentinel was used as an operations training tool for online observations of cooling water performance, demonstrating to operators the importance of control and selected chemistry.