According to Tony Cinson, senior technical leader for Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology can vastly reduce operation and maintenance costs, improve safety, optimize inspection approaches and help industry "overall to make more informed decisions."
"That really encompasses what UAV technology can bring to the table," Cinson said.
Discussing optimizing inspections by utilizing UAV technology, Cinson stressed the technology's "safety-first" advantage to a facility's workforce.
"They are not rappelling off the side of a cooling tower," he said. "They are sitting safely on the ground, and they can do the equivalent or an even more enhanced job of doing the inspection."
UAVs also perform more reliable, efficient and thorough inspections, Cinson said, addressing delegates to the 2018 Energy Drone Summit held recently in Houston.
"Outside a containment building, you don't want a man in a crane basket. That's not really a conducive environment," he said. "You want to get in, get the job done and get out."
UAVs also provide "a lot more extended time" to efficiently complete the inspection, Cinson said, which results in making the process more affordable.
"We're not throwing away manpower and man-hours by erecting and tearing down scaffolding. We're optimizing how we're utilizing our personnel during our inspections," he said.
UAV technology is also valuable from an enhanced modern perspective in that it can "bring new technology to the floor," Cinson said. "We can integrate different visual and other nondestructive evaluation technologies that maybe have a robotic arm or some sort of anchor point from the UAV that can actually touch a component and do a volumetric, ultrasonic inspection."
Cinson said he also believes unmanned vehicle platforms may be optimized even further on a global basis, and not simply restricted to flight.
"It could be on land, on sea or in the air," he said.
Vibration imaging
Optivibe technology, Cinson touted, is a picture comparator at the pixel level in which every pixel of the image is analyzed for motion information.
"This is the kind of cool technology I like to talk about," Cinson said. "We're looking at high-speed cameras taking lots of data, and we're doing a comparison of that to understand what is vibrating within an image. It's basically a whole bunch of accelerometers that are in the image, versus actually outfitting the component with accelerometers."
The pixels in the image, Cinson explained, provide a motion spectrum of cycles-per-minute, "so we can understand the vibration of the motion of components."
"Unlike the Beach Boys' claim in the song 'Good Vibrations,' not everything is a good vibration. There are a lot of things in components that shouldn't be vibrating or are vibrating at an off-frequency," he continued. "It's good to know early on where you can find it in a pump or a valve or a cantilever piping system, small-bore piping system or socket welds. These are some of the applications this is really attuned for."
Some integration challenges still remain, Cinson admitted.
"Drones vibrate when they fly. How are you going to handle that? When we're trying to measure vibration, we don't want the sensor vibrating ⦠so you have to minimize that from vibration isolation techniques."
Ultimately, Cinson said, the goal is stable flight.
"We've already isolated our vibration, so it's really not the vibration that's affecting the data," he said. "It's more so the actual movement of the drone itself. So if we could get to less than a centimeter of drift while we're in it, I think we're actually in a spot where we can acquire data in hover mode."
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