Edinburgh-based WFS Technologies and Stork Technical Services have unveiled a new subsea wireless cathodic protection monitoring system for the offshore industry.
The Seatooth Smart CP, which the firms say is the world’s first subsea wireless cathodic protection monitoring system, has been designed for retrofit to existing fields.
It monitors the effects of corrosion by measuring anode current wirelessly in real-time using a Seatooth S100 device and a wireless enabled ROV.
For both preventive and diagnostic applications, the Seatooth Smart CP system enables wireless monitoring of the condition of the sacrificial anode to verify it is functioning and its rate of depletion.
The CP Engineer can extrapolate what weight of anode material is required to optimize levels of protection based on actual conditions on the structure.
The “real time” gathering of this data signals a significant advance in asset management.
Each monitoring node converts the local data to a digital stream. The digital stream is transmitted wirelessly using Seatooth S100 from WFS, through a networked monitoring system.
This data is wirelessly harvested by ROVs (or divers) as frequently as required providing the maintenance team with time-stamped data showing the condition of the CP system.
This ROV gathered data indicates to the Engineer when to apply the retrofit or plan the maintenance, rather than responding to issues and failures in the field.