Get Survey Ready - Virtual Brew 03/20/24

In this Virtual Brew episode, we cover:

• Hardware preparation – Ensure your equipment is ready before the survey begins
• Interruption settings – Optimize your setup for smooth data collection
• Waveform setup – Configure your tools for precise ECDA preassessment

Transcript

Introduction

Lon Duke
Thank you — hope everybody’s doing well. Today we’re going to be going through an ECDA preassessment and survey setup. This is to help you get survey ready.

Some of the things we’re going to cover: ECDA survey considerations, survey equipment preparation, things like reference cells, accessories, DVM calibration, ECDA survey options, and waveform verification.

What Is ECDA

ECDA is a four-step process. It’s really there to help you know what your pipeline system is doing — your CP system. This is for safety, along with corrosion. You have preassessment, which is what we’re going to talk about today. You have indirect inspection — that’s your actual survey. You have direct examinations, and then you have post assessment. So what we’re going to dig into today is the preassessment.

Pre-Survey Considerations: Pipeline Data

Some of the pre-survey considerations you’ll want to keep an eye on: some of your pipeline data. The coating — what type of coating is it? Is this old, is this new? Is it coal tar, is it FBE? What’s the size of the line, what’s the age of it?

Some right-of-way considerations: what’s your soil resistivity? These are good to know, along with depth of cover. Resistivity can affect your surveys — higher soil resistivity, less current; lower soil resistivity, it’s easier for current to flow. Depth of cover affects both CIS and DCVG surveys — as far as depth of cover, you may have to bump up your rectifiers a little bit to get a good shift if your pipeline is very deep.

Pre-Survey Considerations: CP System

What type of CP system do you have? Are these all galvanic? If you have galvanic anodes, or is this an impressed current system? What are your rectifiers, where are they, how many do you have, and what are their ground beds — what type, and where are they located?

If you know your operational data and construction history on this line — say I have a new section of line here that’s old pipe, you could be looking at coal tar, and then the new section is FBE — that’s going to show up in your survey. You’ll see the readings change with that.

Historical Records

Historical records are always nice to know — if you’ve had a survey done three years ago, five years ago, whenever, what was it like, what am I looking at, are there certain areas I need to pay attention to. So having those historical records is really nice to have.

PCS Field Data Collector Setup

As far as the PCS field data collector goes, these are some of the things we need to know to get that set up. How are you going to run your survey — flag mode or fixed increment? If you’re doing fixed increment, what’s the increment? It has to be in increments of two and a half feet — the requirement calls out no more than five feet, so it’s going to have to be two and a half or five feet.

What type of survey are you running — is this going to be just an on survey? Am I doing a native? Is this a new line — am I doing a native, or have I depolarized this line to get a native? Maybe I need to do a 100-millivolt shift — I have that reference. Or is this going to be an interrupted survey? We’ll talk about interruption in a little while.

Am I running an AC or a DC survey? You can do either one in field data collector — once you start one, you can’t switch over. So if I start a DC survey, I can’t switch over to AC. I’ll have to start a new survey to do AC for my CIS.

Sub-meter GPS — do I need sub-meter GPS on this? Sometimes companies request that we have the Geode for our sub-meter, which goes along with our field data collector.

What kind of notes are you going to collect? This is customizable in FDC, so you can customize your notes, put anything you’re going to need up at the top — always putting in depth of cover, for one example.

Equipment Readiness Checklist

Do you have the right equipment, and is that equipment in good working order? Is your DVM calibrated? Is your field computer charged? Is your DVM charged? The 2130 is a standalone unit, so you’ll need to make sure it’s charged through that USB-C.

Your wiring and cabling — this is really important. Do you have all your wires and cables, have you checked them out before you’ve gone out to the field, do you have good continuity on them? These are probably the things that will fail more often, because they’re hanging off equipment and getting knocked around as you’re moving down the line.

Do you have enough survey wire? Do you have spares of things like cables? Do you have the latest software version of field data collector? That’s also important — we make sure we keep a decent cadence on updates, with enhancements and any type of bug fixes, so make sure that’s up to date.

Reference Cells

Is your reference cell cleaned? This is very important. Do you have a nice, shiny copper cable — or copper rod — on your reference cell? Make sure that’s clean. Do you have the equipment to clean it? Make sure you have the non-metallic sandpaper to clean that copper off — you don’t want to contaminate it. Do you have spare O-rings? Do you have the proper solution — the crystals, distilled water?

When you charge it or clean it and recharge it, do you still have crystals at the bottom when you shake it — that means it’s saturated. It’s kind of like when you put sugar in your tea and stir it and it gets saturated — you still have some sugar crystals at the bottom. Same concept: you want to make sure that reference cell is saturated copper sulfate.

I did an example here looking at a freshly cleaned reference cell and one that had been sitting around for quite some time — it wasn’t dry, but the solution was kind of milky. You can see I got at least a 35-millivolt difference just between those, and that can be significant. So that’s how important it is to get your correct readings for your surveys — make sure that’s clean, so you’re getting a good, solid reference.

Cabling and Strain Relief

I talked a little bit about the cabling and the stress it’s under. If you have the Mesa 3, or the holder for the Mesa 3, or the holder for the iPad, you’ll have a little strain relief on there — use it. It’s there so you can run your cables through, and as you walk around, if it snags on anything, it’s not going to rip out of the DVM — it’s just going to tug on that strain relief. So that’s also important for keeping your equipment in good working order.

Calibration

We do calibration in-house, so you’re aware of that. We have a system we run these through — if you ever need this calibrated, you can set that up via a link, which we’ll include with this presentation. You can always look at the About screen and it’ll show you when it was last calibrated, so that’s always good to know.

When we do a calibration, we do an actual calibration — we run it through a whole array of voltages, and if anything is out of our spec, it’ll get adjusted back in. So it’s not just a verification, it’s a true calibration — be aware of that. You can send those off to a calibration lab; they can do a verification, but they can’t actually calibrate it.

Interruption Settings

Let’s talk about some of our interruption settings. What on/off cycles are you going to run? Does your cycle begin with on or off? What type of relay are you using — mercury or solid state — is it normally open or normally closed? These are all settings within your interruptors, whether it’s a Bullhorn unit, a Micromax unit, or some other company’s interrupter — those settings are the same, so you need to make sure they’re set to match whatever relay you have.

It’s rare now to find a normally open relay — a mercury relay is going to be normally closed, since it’s mechanical, and all of our solid-state relays are set to normally closed.

Are you sharing a corridor with another pipeline, and are you bonded to it? If so, you need to verify and make sure you’re both running on the same cycle. Is there any AC mitigation out there that wreaks havoc on interrupted surveys?

Poll: Cycle Start

Quick poll here — what cycle do you start with at your company, on or off?

That’s about what I was expecting. As I talk with folks out in the field, I’m seeing more and more that it’s starting in the off — so it’s good to know. Thank you.

Verifying Interruption Sync

When you’re going to go out and do an interrupted survey, the very first thing you want to do is go to your DVM and verify that you’re synced with your interrupter. You’re going to see a line that’s on and off, and dotted lines where it crosses that on and off — this is our pipe-to-soil. That line is on, it goes off for a second, it’s on for three seconds — so we’re doing a three-on, one-off.

I want to make sure, especially where that off delay crosses that pipe-to-soil reading, that I’m getting my true polarized potential, my true instant-off — that’s the one you’ll probably adjust the most. So you want to get this dialed in before you start any survey. If you’re doing interruption, you want to verify that you’re in sync and don’t have any other issues out there.

Your “cycle begins with” is the little shark-fin marker — in this case, cycle begins with on, because it’s in the on portion of the cycle. So we have three seconds on, starting in the on.

Troubleshooting Sync Issues

This is one of the most common things we’ll see out there — it’s out of sync, so my on and offs are reversed. Most likely, if it’s steady like this, it’s out of sync by one second and it’s staying that way — it’s not walking through. I can see my interrupter is one, two, three on and one off — it’s just not lining up with me. Most likely, it’s going to be that “cycle begins with” setting. So we’ll set that cycle to begin with on, in this case, and now it looks like it’s matching our interrupter.

Now, you can see a whole range of issues out there. Any type of AC mitigation, again — it wreaks havoc on interrupted surveys, you get this capacitive discharge and recharge. For this particular case, it’s really up to you what you’re going to do with that.
Dairyland now has a PCR-X that takes care of this — it clears this up, you get a good square wave with the PCR-X now. It’s a really nice PCR that they put out there. And then some things can make it even worse — zinc ribbon, AC mitigation, you can have zinc ribbon out there, and it just makes this worse.

We run into this quite a bit — if you’re bonded to somebody else and they’re running a survey, and in this case your survey is running cycle-begins-with-off and they’re running cycle-begins-with-on, everything is shifted by a second for theirs, and it’s affecting yours because you’re bonded. So you want to make sure you connect with the other companies you’re sharing that right-of-way with, and make sure everyone’s on the same page — that gets real important.

Things like a DC transit system can cause all sorts of problems with your interrupted survey too, because there’s all sorts of stray current running on there — there’s a whole project involved in figuring out where you’re picking up that current.

Survey Modes: Fixed Increment vs. Flag Mode

The two different modes you have to decide on before you start your survey: am I going to do fixed increment mode? Fixed increment uses the wire coming out of the hip pack or backpack and measures a distance — so in this case, I’m saying every two and a half feet, or I can do it every five feet, and it’ll trigger a read at every two-and-a-half or five feet.

Something to be aware of when you’re doing that: say I’ve got a thousand feet of pipe, in two sections, with a bend in the pipe — it could be going laterally or going up. If I have that bend and I’m walking along doing my survey, when I get to the end I should have a thousand feet on my survey. But if I don’t anchor that wire down where the bend is, the survey wire is going to come up with me and I’m going to lose footage. In this case, we ended up over 70 feet short on a thousand feet.

The other option is flag mode. With flag mode, you set a distance for your flags, and you go out there — either well before your survey, in preparation, or as you go along — and have somebody out in front of you measuring and marking every hundred feet. You can put a flag down, or just a paint stripe on the ground, and then as you survey, every time you come up to that flag or mark, you enter a flag in your survey.

What it’s going to do is look at how many reads you have in that 100 feet — so if I have 20 reads in 100 feet, it’ll rubber-band that to five-foot increments; if I have 40 reads in that 100 feet, it’ll rubber-band it to two-foot increments. Every 100 feet, it resets to that next 100 feet, so it ends up being pretty accurate on your distance.

Training and Support

We offer all sorts of training options. We offer in-house training at our facility, we can come to your facility, and we can also do virtual training over Teams and similar platforms. Please reach out if you’d like to see more in-depth training — not just on field data collector, but Bullhorn PCS, Survey Manager — we do pretty extensive training on all of those.

For contact, make sure you have this number: 800-229-3404 — option one gets you to support. You can also contact support by email, or visit our support website, which has a lot of documentation and user guides for all our products.

We have training videos online that we’re constantly updating, and if you have any feedback, go to our ideas portal — you can enter a suggestion or a comment.

Closing

That’s all I have for today’s Virtual Brew. I want to thank you all for sitting in on this — I hope you got something out of it. We’ll package this up and get the presentation sent out to you.