Inspection

Whether it is part of your manufacturing, maintenance, safety or regulatory compliance processes, NDT inspection can play an important role in ensuring that your equipment continues to work legally, safely and continously.

Health and Safety programs

  • If your company is working towards obtaining a Certificate of Recognition to reduce WCB premiums, identifying risks, mitigating them and maintaining records becomes very important. Rees NDT Inspection Services helps many firms with inspection and documentation of their equipment for this purpose.

Rental Equipment

  • Rental equipment is another area we do extensive work.
  • Well documented inspection serves to assure customers that the equipment they rent is in serviceable working condition before they rent it.
  • Post-rental inspection allows costs associated with damage during the rental period to be billed to the party whose use caused the damage.
  • A continuous paper-trail of inspection helps prevent disputes about when damage occurred.

Manufacturing

  • Integrate inspection into your fabrication processes
  • Avoid expense by catching fabrication problems at points in the process where they are easier to correct
  • Avoid after-sales rework by ensuring that only completely sound work is delivered.
  • Use in-process inspection as a selling point to your customers.

Regulatory Compliance

  • Pressure Vessels are subject to ABSA (or similar) regulation. We can help with corrosion surveys.
  • Overhead lifting equipment has mandated inspection and maintenance requirements.
  • Oilfield equipment is subject to CAODC maintenance standards.
  • OH&S codes generally make employers responsible for due diligence in ensuring that workers are using equipment that is known to be in safe working condition. NDT inspection can help meet this goal.
UT & Corrosion

Corrosion Surveys
Nothing lasts forever. Especially not flowline and piping. Corrosion surveys help companies:

  • Identify equipment that should be removed from service before it fails
  • Measure the rate at which equipment is degrading so:
    • Replacement budgets can be planned
    • Costs associated with relatively destructive operations can be estimated and billed accordingly
    • Estimate and forecast replacement equipment inventory needs
  • Meet regulatory requirements regarding vessel maintenance and documentation

Rees NDT Inspection Services can help you plan and execute a corrosion survey strategy for your equipment. We can document your equipment, band it with stainless steel banding for identification purposes if required, and perform ultrasonic wall thickness testing at specified points to establish a baseline and thereafter detect corrosion and wear.

Corrosion surveys of pressure vessels are mandated by law in every jurisdiction we operate.

As part of many companies’ Certificate of Recognition efforts, we have assisted them in applying identifying banding on their production flowline. A baseline survey of its condition is then conducted, and pieces that have exceeded their safe working corrosion allowances are removed from service. Year-to-year records are maintained, providing documentation of the companies’ efforts to mitigate risk, and providing insight into service life.

Ultrasonic Testing (UT)
When there is more to something than meets the eye, ultrasonic testing (UT) can see below the surface. As a primary alternative to radiography in finding subsurface flaws, UT can serve in situations where getting good radiographs is impossible, impractical or inpermissible, For instance, the desired geometry may not lend itself to radiography, the situation may not readily permit you to set up for good radiographs, or the site may impossible to secure in such a way that radiography can be safely performed.

UT results are also immediate. The operator and the client can both be on hand during the testing to locate and define a suspected indication. There is no need to cordon off the inspection location for safety and regualtory reasons, and the results are viewable in real-time at the site of the inspection. UT shines in many applications

  • In verification of welding processes:
    • You’ve had something welded. On the surface, the weld looks good–but did it penetrate completely?
    • In multi-pass welds, was all the slag and inclusion removed between each pass?
    • In welds where you only have access to one side, was there burn-through and resulting defects on the inaccessible side?
  • Your piece is such that a crack or defect will only show through to the surface AFTER a catastrophic failure.
  • You have a cast piece that may have a defect, such as a sand pocket, below the surface in a critical area.
  • You have a fluid flow that will cause wear below tolerances at direction changes and areas of turbulence.
  • You have sacrifical pieces in place to absorb wear, and want to acertain their present condition.

Whatever your needs, we have the equipment and personnel available to meet your ultrasonic testing needs

Downhole Tools

Where the toolstring meets the bedrock is where you’ll find downhole tools and bottom hole assemblies.
Tool types that we inspect include but aren’t limited to:

  • Bits
  • Casing Scrapers
  • Chicsans
  • Chokes
  • Couplings
  • Crossover Subs
  • Drill Collars
  • Elevators
  • Fishing Tools
  • Jar Assemblies
  • Jack Knifes
  • Junk Baskets
  • Loop Bails
  • Mills
  • Mud Motors
  • Nipples
  • Nubbins
  • Overshots
  • Pup Joints
  • Coil Tubing Services (CTS) tools
  • Spear Assemblies
  • Stabilizers
  • Subs and Specialized Subs
  • Swab Mandrel
  • Swedges & Chicsans
  • Swivels
  • Thru Tubing Tools
  • Tongs
  • Washpipe and Washpipe Tools
  • Any other bottom hole assembly you could name!

Where desired, we can supply thread protectors, gauge connections, and dress or reface seals as required. Tools can be inspected at our shop, your shop, in the yard or in the field.

Failure is not an option for downhole tools. If you run it, we can inspect it.

General

When failure is not an option, get it inspected

We can inspect virtually anything, from automotive parts to bridge deck members. If you know where something may fail, and the surface can be accessed and prepped for inspection, we can help determine fitness-for-service. Among the items we have inspected are:

  • Water towers
  • Bridge deck members
  • Portable sewage treatment plants
  • Tractor-trailer axles
  • Engine and compressor connecting rods
  • ROPS and FOPS
  • Headache racks
  • Storage racks
  • Tank mounts
  • Flowline weld-o-lettes
  • Tanks
  • Trailer hitches and mounts
  • Propane Bullets
  • and more

Steel, Stainless Steel, Cast iron, Aluminum–doesn’t matter. We have techniques and trained inspectors to meet your needs.

PMI

You own it, you use it–but you have no documentation.

One of the first questions that needs to be answered is “What is ‘it’ made of?” And that is where PMI enters the picture. PMI stands for Positive Material Identification. That used to be a cumbersome, destructive process. You would gouge out 40-60g of material, hopefully not contaminating it or destroying the piece, and send it to a lab. The lab would then analyse the sample and send you a report, days or weeks later.

Our inspectors use a process that is a lot faster and simpler than that! The Innov-X Systems α-2000 AS portable X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) system uses an electric X-Ray tube, an onboard detector and processor to deliver results from a prepped surface in less than 30 seconds. No radioactive sources means no regulatory hassle. With a weight under 5 lbs, it can go anywhere the operator can go.

Sometimes you own or purchase used equipment whose manufacturer or fabricator has ceased operations. When it comes time to repair or certify it, there’s a problem because capacity and repair procedures are greatly influenced by the material properties involved. PMI and hardness testing can go a long way toward resolving these questions.

Other times, the issue is that you have purchased materials overseas. It looks like a familiar. It looks like what you have contracted for. But given past history, you’d like to be sure that the materials that it should have been constructed out of are what it actually is constructed out of. PMI can determine if that expensive alloy you paid for actually got used in all the items that were delivered — and yes, that has been a real-case occurance.

Items that are going to be used in sour-service oilfield operations generally need to be NACE MR0175 compliant and certified. Items exposed to H2S at typical environmental temperatures will be subject to sulfide stress cracking, which is a form of hydrogen embrittlement. Items that are too hard, or contain certain kinds of alloying materials — primarily nickel — in larger than permissible quantities will become subject to immensly destructive corrosion and cracking if exposed to wet H2S conditions. If you have mill certs for your items like spools, adapters and other wellhead equipment, then a simple test for hardness will be the extent of the NDT required to acertain whether your piece can be certified as NACE MR0175 compliant. When you don’t have mill certs — well, that’s when PMI is a very, very handy thing to have avaliable.

When the question is “What is ‘it’ made of?” We can provide an answer.