No abstract

The control of major hazards involving dangerous substances in the chemical and process industry requires verifying equipment ageing according to the current legislation. This means to monitor its real conditions regarding degradation mechanisms and forecast their evolution over time. A system, named Virtual Sensor, supports this activity that is usually conducted during on-field inspections (safety walks). It is designed to collect ageing-related information, process data through some models, and produce prognostic estimates regarding the corrosion rate, the probability of the critical pit, the corrosion evolution on the equipment surface, and the residual lifetime, visualising the results in Augmented Reality (AR). An atmospheric storage tank of diesel oil was chosen as the case study; its 3D model was realised, and a miniature model was reproduced in the laboratory. Through the Virtual Sensor, data of past inspections were acquired. The application successfully managed and elaborated these data, showing the outputs in AR during a safety walk.

Much of the equipment that is used in the chemical and process industry and for handling or treating hazardous substances is subject to deterioration. To manage the risk of major accidents due to this deterioration, the current legislation requires periodic controls that must be carried out to verify the health conditions (ageing). To support the inspectors performing this task, a virtual sensor has been designed and developed. It is a system composed of hardware and software that uses mathematical models and augmented reality to assist in on-field inspections for monitoring and predicting equipment ageing. Currently, there are no AR devices to perform inspections aimed at verifying the integrity of equipment. The virtual sensor collects ageing-related information and returns the corrosion rate, the probability of the critical pit, the corrosion evolution through iso-contour corrosion maps, and the RUL; finally, it allows visualising the equipment condition through augmented reality, (e.g., by means of thickness maps and tables that overlay the equipment). The aim of this paper is to present the graphical interface of the software application, which has been improved to minimise errors due to human–machine interaction. A large diesel storage tank has been used to show how the virtual sensor works.