Subsea Expo 2019 - Kirsty Whyte interview with Mike Smith, Technical Director at Eddyfi Technologies

What brings you to Subsea Expo this year?

Hello Kirsty, well we're actually introducing a complete new product this year to the Subsea Expo and with the launch of the U 41. This is the next generation of subsea ACFM equipment, primarily for detecting cracks subsea and subsea structures, pipelines and vessels.

Can you tell us about the product that you're launching at the show and the benefits for the industry?

Sure, a CFM is a technology which has been around for about 30 years now and has quickly become a de facto way of finding and detecting subsurface fatigue cracking on structures, jackets and other subsea structures. It has some advantages over some of the more conventional techniques such as MPI in that it requires much less cleaning in order to carry out the inspection and also all the data that it takes is recorded so it's auditable and has a full record of every inspection that's taken. The other advantage is that the technique is able to determine the depth of defects that we find as well as just a surface length. So, very quickly we can provide information which gives engineers an assessment of the criticality of the flaws that they're finding and whether to repair, whether to monitor or how to manage their assets more efficiently.

Let me tell you a little bit about the instrument that we've got here. This embodiment here is for diver deployment. The idea is the diver will take this this subsea bottle down with them and attached to the subsea bottle are up to three individual CFM probes. This is a big improvement over the previous generation where we can only attach one probe at a time. So, if the diver came to a situation, a different geometry perhaps, where they needed to change probes, we'd have to recover the unit to the surface, change the probe out and then put it back down again. Now that all takes time and cost, so what we've done now is we've added these three probe connectors so that very quickly a diver can switch between different probes and utilise that time more effectively. We've also introduced a new probe, the diver mini array. What this does is add an array of sensors under the nose here which greatly expands the coverage of each pass of the probe. It means that we can cover wells much quicker and with much greater coverage than we've done before.

This is available alongside some other more conventional probes which divers have been used to using as well. So, this is a typical kind of pencil probe and this whole generation, this new generation of the U41 is a complete change from the original U31. Every part of it through the sequence has changed. The old unit was designed back in early 2000 and obviously there's been a lot of changes in electronics and in materials performance since that time, so we've incorporated all those extra features into this new unit. It gives much faster acquisition, much smoother data, you get a much higher data resolution. We were able to work through thicker coatings, if we look at a sample of weld here now, with the mini array we'd be able to inspect this very rapidly but the new improvements to the electronics means that we can actually inspect through up to around  8 millimetres thick of coating which enables us to inspect through a layer of marine growth rather than necessarily having to clean it down to the base metal, up to the base coating thickness.

We've also upgraded everything through the topside unit here which is communicating with the subsea bottle. We've lightened the umbilical and we've made it so that three of these umbilicals can be connected together. We have a total length of 450 metres that could be used between the diver and the station topside. A complete rework of the software to make it more user-friendly, more intuitive and to be able to make reporting much easier. We hope we've got a package that divers will be able to use very easily. With also using the same bottle design, we were able to mount this bottle on to ROV’s and with the different set of probes we’re able to support subsea inspections but remotely through the use of ROV’s.

Those are two exciting roles that we can do with this particular piece of equipment.

We've seen a lot more technology this year at Subsea Expo, what sort of impact is that having on the industry? We're seeing it change a lot, going more digital and using new technologies.

Yes, very much so. the industry has always got increasing demands in speed, time in terms of cost but of course there are lot of aging assets and keeping those assets reliable and producing requires good information about the structural condition. What we're trying to do is provide the best technology that can give the best information to asset owners so they can make the best strategies in order to keep those assets operating properly.