Get Survey Ready: ECDA Preassessment & Survey Setup | Virtual Brew 3/21/2024

Hear from Lon Duke, Field Data Collection Specialist at American Innovations, as he walks through everything you need to be ready for survey season at our Virtual Brew monthly webinar. From assessments to setup, and everything in between, we’ve got you covered with practical tips you won’t want to miss!

Transcript

Introduction

[Presenter]
Thank you, Justin — yeah, like he just said, we’re going to look at some ECDA preassessment, and then setting up a CI survey using FDC.

ECDA Overview & Reference Standards

For the preassessment, there are a couple of documents out there — NACE documents, now AMPP of course, but they’re still called NACE SP0207. It covers ECDA — it’s a four-step process, and part of it is that preassessment. The preassessment is just getting to know your pipe, getting to know what you’re getting into once you get out there in the field.

Indirect inspections include a native or a depolarized CIS, DCVG, ACVG. Direct examinations are digging, and then there’s post assessment. Part of the stuff they call out for structure and conditions in this document — I’m not going to read through all of it, but you can read through it at your leisure.

Preassessment: Getting to Know Your Pipe

A couple of things stand out if you look through it — it’s about getting to know your pipe. Where are your test points? What product is going through there — that actually makes a difference. What’s the pipe diameter, wall thickness, any type of crossings, paved areas, what’s your depth of cover, coating information? If you have any pipeline maps, that’s really helpful to see — does this pipe have pigs in it, does it float over to the other side of the right-of-way? Any type of historical data is nice to have with any of this.

Preassessment: CP System & Operating Data

As far as operating data, this calls out things like: do you have a test station survey you can look at? What’s your current source — this is pretty important, to know exactly what your CP system is, what the output type is, and where things are located. What bonds do you have out there — if you have any bonds, what are the identifications, what are the types? Do you have any electrical isolations — how many stations are on this pipe that you may be isolating your CP system from?

Stray current — is there any known stray current out there, anything you’ve seen in the past, particularly AC? Is this right-of-way in an AC line? AC mitigation is such a huge topic right now — more and more of these lines are getting shared with power line right-of-ways.

Preassessment: Additional Items

Some other miscellaneous things: emergency operating maps, ingress and egress of the right-of-way, landowner issues — that’s one to make sure you’re on top of, it’s nice to get to know the landowners on these so you’re not facing the wrong end of a dangerous situation, which has happened. Historical data again — do you have any other survey data you can look at, and any type of previous integrity assessments?

Preassessment per NACE SP0502

SP0502 calls out a lot of the same things, but it kind of groups them together. Pipe data: what’s your coating — that’s important — what’s the size, what’s the age of this pipe? What’s your soil condition, your soil resistivity, maybe your pH? What’s the depth of cover on this pipe — that affects those surveys so much.

Again, the CP system: do you have rectifiers out there? If you do, what type of ground beds are there, where are they located, or is this a galvanic anode system — which, if you’re going to do CI and try interrupted, that causes other issues you’ll have to take care of. It causes a lot of issues if you’re trying to do DCVG, especially if you don’t know where those galvanic anodes are — to DCVG, that’s just a big holiday.

The operational data — construction history — has there been new pipe put in the ground in this right-of-way? And again, historical data.

Field Computer & Survey Setup Planning

As far as the field computer goes — the equipment, what we’re going to need to do to pre-assess what we’re going to use for this survey. We have flag or fixed increment, and if you’re doing fixed increment, what’s the increment — I’ll talk about that a little later on. Is this going to be an on survey, is it going to be a native or a depolarized, or are you going to do interrupted? Those are questions you’ll have to ask.

If it’s interrupted, what cycle do you want it at — what cycle are other people interrupting around you, other operators or other line owners, to make sure everyone’s in sync? Is this going to be an AC or a DC survey — we can do both, once you start one you can’t switch over to the other, but you can run an AC survey or a DC survey. Again, AC mitigation out there — I’ll show you some examples in the waveforms coming up — that causes havoc with interruption.

Sub-meter GPS — are they requesting sub-meter GPS with this survey? Then you’ll need an external GPS to run on it — our GPS in the DVM and in the AX is standard grade, 2 to 5 meters. What type of notes are they going to want — pipe exposures, pipeline markers are pretty typical, pigs, depth of cover — and that remarks list is customizable, we’ll talk about that too.

Equipment Readiness

Do you have the right equipment set up? This is a preassessment again that will save you a lot of time and money — going through your equipment to make sure everything is ready to go before you get out in the field. Your reference cell — do you have the correct type, is it cleaned, is it charged? Is your DVM calibrated? Is your field computer fully charged, is your DVM fully charged? These are things you want to make sure you get done ahead of time.

Your wire and cabling — it’s always a good idea to check those out, check them for continuity, make sure there’s no fraying or anything on them. Do you have any spares — spare cables is a good idea.

Q&A: Depth Limits for Accurate Survey Data

[Moderator]
We have a comment here in the chat: what depth would you say is the limit for obtaining accurate survey data?

[Presenter]
Well, I hate to give the old NACE-class answer, but it depends — a lot of that depends on your soil resistivity. High-resistivity soil, and depth of cover — if you’re collecting your data and you know what your soil resistivity is and what your depth of cover is, you can assess that data afterwards and say, okay, I can see my depth of cover is about 8 feet, which is pretty good, but in high-resistivity soils I’m not going to get as much.

Your CP system matters too — it kind of depends on your CP system as well, how many amps your rectifiers are having to put out to keep that pipe protected. So I hate to say it, but it really does depend on a lot of different factors — but it does affect it, particularly with DCVG, by the way.

Software Version & DVM Authentication

If you’re in the FDC app and go to Settings and About, you can look for your latest software — our latest version out right now is 1.17. We’ll be coming out with a 2.0 later this year. This will also give you your DVM information — serial number, calibration date, as you can see mine is overdue for calibration — and when you last authenticated, meaning when you last opened FDC with Wi-Fi, and when that token expires.

Verifying Interruption Sync Before Survey

I always try to hammer this home: the first thing you do once you’re set up and ready to get out there and do your survey — if you’re going to do an interrupted survey, you’ve got to go to your DVM first and check your waveform. I can’t stress that enough. You’re going to hook up to your pipe and make sure you’re in sync with your interrupter — you’re going to adjust your on-setup and off-delay settings to make sure they’re crossing that waveform line correctly, to give you a good on and off reading.

Right now you see we’ve got 1152 and 926 for our ons and offs, and you’re going to make sure that “cycle begins with” is correct — all this has to do is match your interruptor. If you see something like this, where everything is shifted over by a second, so now this off is not in the off portion of the cycle, most likely it’s that “cycle begins with” setting — if you just shift that, it’ll line up. That’s probably 80 to 90% of the time, if you see it shifted like that, that’s what fixes the issue.

Reading Waveforms: Common Issues

So what are we going to look at in these waveforms? Here are some examples: AC mitigation — you’re going to see that capacitive discharge and recharge. There’s really not a lot you can do about that once it’s there — the PCRs are what’s causing that. Dairyland does have a PCR-X out now that mitigates this. If you have zinc ribbon along with your AC mitigation, it really makes it worse.

Up in the upper right, we have some interference — you see some stair-stepping here, which usually means there’s another interruptor out of sync with the rest of yours. You’re getting something out of sync, so you can’t get a true reading — in this case, you’re not getting a real on reading. Something like this, where the waveform meanders, that’s a DC transit system — you’ll see these. I saw the worst one just outside of Atlanta — it meandered all over the place, and you really can’t get anything usable.

CI Survey Settings

Let’s look at some settings for CI — your initial setup. I’m not going to go through all of them, I’ll highlight some of the important ones. One reading per cycle was just added fairly recently — if you have telluric currents out there, mainly way up north, you’ll get them a lot worse. This will allow you to take one reading per cycle — if you’re doing a three-on, one-off, you only get one reading in that 4 seconds, and it’ll only allow you to take one reading that way, so it can line up with the TC (telluric current) compensation.

Skip mode — I’ll go over that one. File autosave — I want to highlight this: turn this on, so that every so often the survey you’re running gets autosaved and you don’t have to worry about hitting save. Very important feature — and I’ll mention this later — but save the survey first for this to take hold.

Q&A: Skip Mode Explanation

[Unclear name, heard as “heon”]
Can you give a little more context on that previous slide — explain skip mode a little bit? One of the questions was: is skip mode keeping something like a moving average of the reading?

[Presenter]
William, yes — so it depends on if you’re using fixed increment or flag mode. If you’re using fixed increment, you’re still going to walk across that area you can’t survey, so you’ll have all your stationing, and then you’ll pick it back up again. If you’re doing flag mode, you’ll come up to the edge of where you can’t survey — a road or whatever it is — you’ll put in a gap, and then you go across and put in another gap. What that’s going to do is rubber-band from that gap back to your last flag, and then your end gap to your next flag — so in the case of a 100-foot flag, you’ll still have that 100 feet. It’ll keep all that stationing.

All this setting does is decide whether you want to show each of those stations in your survey, or just skip from your start to the end of your skip with no data in there.

Customizing Remarks

Remarks — I talked about this, customizing your remarks. It’s easy to do, it’s in the settings at the very bottom. You can come in and edit these — if you have specific ones you know you’re going to be using a lot, you can select and edit them and put them up at the top. So when you’re adding your remarks, in this case you could just enter a code and it’ll fill in “Highway” — you don’t have to type it all out. All of this is customizable.

Setting Up a New CI Survey in FDC

Let’s look at setting up a new survey. We’re going to start a brand new survey — first thing, we’re going to fill in the segment. The segment and pipe, if you’re going to bring this into PCS, really needs to match what you have in PCS, so it knows where to put it — which right-of-way in PCS to put this in. If you don’t, it’ll bring it in as a new, unknown section, so make sure those match if you can.

As we go down: AC or DC — once you start one, you can’t switch over. If I start a DC survey, I can’t switch and do some AC — it has to be one or the other. Ascending or descending — I can start here and go downstream, or start upstream and come back, whichever, just be aware it does not go past zero. I’ve seen people start surveys in descending, starting at zero — it’s not going to go anywhere, because it won’t go negative.

Flagged and fixed — I’ll talk about those on the next couple of slides — and we can do metric as well.

Fixed increment uses the wire spooler — the chainer, as we call it — to trigger your reads. These increments have to be in increments of two and a half feet — there’s a wheel with a micro switch on it, and every 20 rotations is two and a half feet, so it triggers those reads. It has to be 2.5 feet, 5 feet, 7.5 feet — increments of 2.5 feet.

If you’re doing flag mode, you’ll set your flag distance — in this case, 100 — so I’ll have a flag, take my readings, and as I go along it increments by one. Once I hit the flag, it counts how many readings I have between the flags — if I have 40 readings, it’ll rubber-band all that stationing to 2.5-foot increments; if I have 20 readings, it’ll rubber-band it all to 5-foot increments. It’s kind of automatic, and you can monitor those flags — it’ll warn you if you go past one, letting you know it expected a flag and you may have missed it, so you can double-check and back up to put your flag in.

Interruption Settings in the Survey

In the settings, we also have this set up so your settings are correct — it needs to match whatever was good in your DVM when you checked it. Those just need to match here, so you’re getting true, good on and off readings. Your off delay is out past any noise, any ringing, any anodic spikes or anything like that — that’s the one you’ll adjust the most, that off delay.

Saving and Autosave

Then we’ll save the file — make sure you save this file ahead of time. It’ll come up as soon as you’re finished with the properties, and it’ll give you this prompt. Once you save that, it allows the autosave feature — as you’re going along, every however many minutes you set it to, every 10 minutes, every 15 minutes, it’ll go ahead and autosave, and you’ll be safe with your data.
Any questions on that, anything that’s come up?

Training Options

[Presenter]
Some of the things we’re really starting to ramp up on is our product training — I want to talk about that briefly. We have a couple of types of PCS training — admin, and then intermediate or user training. We have Survey Manager training, we have the FDC field data collector training, and we’ll also provide Bullhorn training as well. We have a QR code here if you want to scan that.
Go to our training options — I see Sarah scanning it to test it, I hope it works, if not we’ll blame that. And here’s a little feedback survey — if you want to take this and give us some feedback, please feel free to, and we’ll be more than happy to answer any questions you have in the future, so please let us know.

Closing Q&A: Periodic Survey Training

[Moderator]
If there aren’t any more questions — we just had one come in asking if there’s training on periodic survey.

[Presenter]
Yes — actually, in the module we just dropped in the chat, there’s a brief overview of the periodic survey along with a few options, so feel free to click on that and run through it.

For the questions coming in — anything related to our products: PCS, CPDM, annual periodic, test points, rectifiers, bonds, anode tanks, using our hand data collectors, using our soil resistivity product, any product and any associated products — we can definitely put together custom training. There’s a tremendous amount of online content as well on how to do things, and at the end of the day we can also come on-site with you, or do things virtually. We’ve gone through so many different iterations of this, but for nearly 40 years of our history, we’ve always provided training. So anything anybody needs, just reach out to your salesperson, or reach out to support at AI Worldwide — confident that we can answer questions and get you guys in the field effectively.

Closing

Steve, you can see here — there’s a bunch of different feedback loops. Christian, could you also put in customer service and sales and a couple other links? So, any of these numbers, any of these websites, it all comes back to all of our teams — just reach out to any of these different contact points, and we’ll get you in touch with anyone you need to help build a custom agenda or get more information. I’m happy to help support.