A pipeline owner in the Middle East has a total of 183 kilometers of 18-inch pipeline to transport natural gas. Over the years, the pipeline has accumulated dust – tons of it. The greatest problem is that excessive dust shuts down the plant when it enters the turbine generators and control instruments. The 10-micron filters helped to trap a large amount though much was also found downstream of the filters.
The owner had one requirement that created a real challenge. The operation had to be completely invisible to the pipeline owner. They had to be able to provide uninterrupted electricity to the households and not encounter any dust at the receiving end. While other contractors proposed new filtering systems, ROSEN came up with a single-module cyclonic cleaning system.
ROSEN then performed an electronic geometry inspection and found no deformations greater than 2%. Finally, a metal loss inspection revealed no internal corrosion features and 26 external features, concluding that the coating damage was incidental and there was no structural coating failure. The operation served to remove no less than 28 tons of dust from the pipeline and managed to filter 99.8% of the dust larger than 3 microns in size.