(6c) Process Equipment Imaging By Tomographic Gamma Scan
AIChE Spring Meeting and Global Congress on Process Safety
2018
2018 Spring Meeting and 14th Global Congress on Process Safety
Distillation Symposium
In Honor of Andrew Sloley
Monday, April 23, 2018 - 10:32am to 11:02am
Gamma scanning is a nuclear inspection technique widely used for troubleshooting industrial process equipment in refineries and petrochemicals. A radiation source and detector move vertically along the height of the vessel and the radiation readings are used to plot the graph of density profile. In recent years, many improvements have been added to this technique, but essentially the result of gamma scanning still consists in a 1-D density plot. We presented, at the 2016 Spring Meeting, the tomographic gamma scan that uses image reconstruction techniques to show the result of gamma scan as a 2-D density distribution image. In this work, we present the results obtained applying the innovative technique for the first time in a real operating process equipment. The obtained images match well with the 1-D density plots obtained by the conventional gamma scan. However, they also reveal a possible process problem that has never been visualized before with the traditional technique. The tomographic gamma scan can be immediately applied in practice with low financial investment.