Diagnosing Plant Pipeline System Performance Using Radiotracer Techniques

This study presents an experimental work in a petrochemical company for scanning a buried pipeline using Tc99m radiotracer based on the measured velocity changes, in order to determine the flow reduction along a pipeline. In this work, Tc99m radiotracer was injected into the pipeline and monitored by sodium iodide scintillation detectors located at several positions along the pipeline. The flow velocity has been calculated between every two consecutive detectors along the pipeline. Practically, six experiments have been carried out using two different data acquisition systems, each of them being connected to four detectors. During the fifth experiment, a bypass was discovered between the scanned pipeline and another buried parallel pipeline connected after the injection point. The results indicate that the bypass had a bad effect on the volumetric flow rate in the scanned pipeline.