NDT Folks

Assessment of rope condition either by visual examination or drawing a specimen rope length and subjecting it to destructive evaluation seldom speaks about integrity of the entire rope length in the installation[sup1]. Further, ropes that are used on friction winders and aerial ropeway passenger cable car installations cannot be assessed at any cost due to non-availability of rope length for destructive investigation. Under these situations, non-destructive investigation is the only means for its evaluation to study the behavior.

The heart of this system is a Remote Field Eddy Current (RFEC) sensor able to measure the pipeline's wall thickness. In addition, two fisheye cameras at each end of the robot provide high-quality visual inspection capabilities for locating joints, tee-offs, and other pipeline configuration. The robot is launched, operated, and retrieved under live conditions and can negotiate diameter changes, bends and tees up to 90 degrees as well as inclined and vertical pieces of the pipeline network. In its first full deployment of the system, more than 2.000 feet of a pipeline were successfully inspected.