Subsea wall thickness inspection through coatings

TSC Subsea builds ARTEMIS, an ROV-deployed inspection system that measures remaining wall thickness on subsea pipelines, flowlines, and risers using Acoustic Resonance Technology. It reads directly through attenuative coatings thicker than 100mm with depth sizing to around 0.2mm, and it identifies whether wall loss sits on the inside or the outside of the pipe. The result is a direct wall thickness measurement taken in place by a work-class ROV, with no coating removal and no divers.

Track record and clients

TSC has more than 10 years of deployments from the splash zone to ultra-deepwater, with a robotic portfolio that includes the vCompact tight-access scanner, MagCrawler, and HullScanner. The company developed the vCompact for Beach Energy in the Bass Strait, inspecting a 20-inch line near the Thylacine A platform where the field joints could only be reached through a narrow access window.

The commercial case

Coating removal is the slow, expensive, and integrity-sensitive part of a subsea inspection campaign. Reading through the coating removes that step entirely, so the inspection becomes the measurement rather than the measurement plus a coating repair project. For an operator running ageing subsea infrastructure, it changes both the cost and the schedule of a life extension case on lines that cannot be pigged.

Why it is in the Hub

Pulse represents TSC Subsea in Australia because the ageing-asset and life-extension questions on local subsea infrastructure are the same ones the technology already answers in the North Sea and the Bass Strait. The Australian deployment with Beach Energy is the proof that it works in local conditions, under local access constraints, on a local operator's line.