Planys performed underwater  inspection for an outfall buried pipeline for a fertilizer and industrial chemical plant. In a neighbouring field (through which the pipeline goes), heavy leakage was observed. An externally installed quay wall was suspected to have pierced through the buried pipeline, thus causing heavy leakage. The distance between the point of entry of the pipeline to the suspected location of damage was 310m away thus making it inaccessible for any diver based inspection without taking shutdown and dewatering the entire pipeline. Thus, Planys ROV was called in to inspect the pipeline without dewatering it.

Scope of Work: Underwater visual inspection to identify cause of the damage to the outfall pipeline (upto 310m length) and also assess its general condition.

Planys Solution: The inspection was performed using Planys’ ROV Orca fitted with high resolution camera, altimeter and depth sensor.

1. The ROV was deployed through the manhole using a crane and navigated through the length of the pipeline where it found the quay wall that pierced the pipeline.
2. The findings indicated the presence of a section of the quay wall (0.5 m wide x 6 m length) protruding inside the pipeline at a distance of 305 m from the deployment point.
3. The terminating edge of the quay wall was clearly identified and also correlated to the above ground pictures of the quay wall sheet pile structure.
4. The rest of the pipeline sections were found to be normal
5. All anomalies/defects were plotted against geo-tagged CAD drawing of every section on the Planys Analytics Dashboard (PAD) with localised click-to-view video.

Photos showing deployment of the ROV and while entering the pipeline from the top

Underwater images of quay wall found inside the pipelines