The effectiveness of acoustic emission testing in corrosion monitoring and qualifying the deferral of storage tank turnarounds
Al Lutfallah Muhammed
Saudi Aramco
Email: muhammed.lutfallah@aramco.com
In refineries, the turnaround of storage tanks has implications on the financial side and supply chain operations. Owner-operators have deployed different on-stream corrosion monitoring and inspection techniques to assess the condition of storage tanks and explore opportunities for reducing downtime and postponement of the internal inspection. One of those techniques is acoustic emission (AE) testing, which is widely used to assess the extent of tank bottom corrosion and qualify storage tank turnaround deferrals. This paper reviews the effectiveness of AE testing in the inspection of tank bottoms in two ways, namely benchmarking the regulations in different countries and comparison between sample AE testing and magnetic flux leakage (MFL) testing results through a case study. The comparative analysis showed a noticeable mismatch between the two techniques. Therefore, the paper proposes a set of alternatives to using AE testing for tank bottom inspection and deferral of internal inspection.
