Piglet – a new robotic solution to lower maintenance costs and improve safety in high pressure gas systems

"Within oil & gas processing, the challenges of high pressure and or temperature, safety and certification has, until now, meant that the benefits of robotic viewing of online infrastructure has not been available. This results in many processes across the world under-performing, running under optimum flow rates - and therefore below optimum revenues for the operator. At a time when oil & gas profits are under pressure key players are looking for innovative ways to improve performance and revenues from existing plant.

Glycol dehydration is the most common and economical means of removing water from natural gas and their interiors present an extreme and challenging environment, operating with natural gas at a pressure of around 50-200bar. There is currently no robotic system capable of inspecting the columns during operation. Any blockages should be identified and quickly removed in order to maintain performance. Blocked ports and other problems can occur that degrade performance, reduce process throughput and plant profitability. Our concept is Piglet (Pigging for un-piggable lines), which will provide a live video feeds to an operator, to give a true picture of the internal condition of the facility. This will provide early warning of plugging, scale, wax or corrosion, which may result in system dangerous failure and/or costly downtime involving potentially hazardous human intervention."