With Covid-19 causing significant limitations on asset integrity inspections due to travel restrictions, social distancing and redundancies of key, trained inspection staff, it has left many critical facilities, such as power generation (including nuclear and renewables) infrastructure at increased risk of failure and unscheduled outage. Covid has also caused a significant 22% drop in electricity demand from reduced commercial and industrial operations, forcing many stochastic renewables sources such as wind to be stopped, as well as new builds being cancelled or delayed, causing a 6% increase in efficient closed-cycle-gas-turbine (CCGT) plants to offer flexibility and grid resilience due to the changeable supply and demand requirements. This increases reliance on ageing power generation assets which require more frequent inspection to prevent forced outages.

Statutory asset integrity inspection and fitness for service is required to justify safe and efficient operation between shutdowns and service intervals under the Pressure Systems Safety Regulations (PSSR) 2000, Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) and to meet climate legislation such as the Large Combustion Plant Directive.

Cracks, flaws and defects in metals and welds contribute to 77% of unscheduled outages, which have significant impacts on availability to the grid as well as huge costs running in to £M's per day of lost productivity and direct costs which are passed on to the consumer. The loss in thermal efficiency due to leaks and steam loss contributes to an equivalent increase of 1-2 kTonnes of carbon dioxide per hour in UK emissions.

Inspection is typically managed on these types of infrastructure using non-destructive methods such as ultrasonic testing (UT) which offers high accuracy, penetrating power and sensitivity with non-hazardous, economical hardware to directly detect, size and characterise flaws and defects within critical components such as pipes, reactor vessels and heat exchangers.

The implementation of NDT inspections & subsequent maintenance is routinely undertaken around planned shutdowns when assets are cool and/or isolated. This often involves an order of magnitude increase in personnel presence on site to cover as much infrastructure as possible to limit the costly outage duration.

Ionix will develop a pre-production prototype of a new ultrasonic sensor in this project, capable of the continuous monitoring of defects and flaws in alloy steel components, up to 600 C, removing the need for shutdowns to take measurements and allowing continued plant operation. These new high-temperature defect sensors will be connected to commercial WirelessHART ultrasonic nodes to be immediately accessible to power generation asset integrity end-users remotely.

The project will result in a prototype to demonstrate the key deliverables, engage with service providers and end-user operators to prove the technology and enable Ionix to proceed to manufacture and productionisation. If successful, an eventual product will result in greater asset intelligence on the 32 CCGT (42% of UK electricity generation) and 14 Nuclear power plants in the UK, to defer maintenance and justify cleaner more efficient operation of existing plant.