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SOCORRO | Seeking Out Corrosion, before it is too late

Region:

Europe

Financed by

SOCORRO is an Interreg2Seas project, bringing together a multidisciplinary consortium, that is developing a new approach to the challenge of efficient corrosion management. A combination of artificial intelligence, expert knowledge and data collected from the corroding environment will be used to make an objective estimate of corrosion risk accumulated over the lifetime of an asset. A decision support tool will finally provide support in making the right management decisions.

Context

An often underestimated threat to our economy is steel corrosion, in any kind of industry where water meets steel: the maritime sector, ports, water purification plants, energy production, offshore renewable energy production. The costs pertaining to corrosion are immense: a DNV-GL report sets all-round corrosion costs at more than 500 billion EUR for the European region alone, generally +/- 3.8% of the European GDP. However, consultation with industry indicates there is no general approach to determining where and when corrosion is taking place so that preventative and remedial works can be targeted. Solutions are generic, and there is no overall awareness of possible cost reductions: 25-30% of the corrosion-related costs are superfluous – the baseline for the project. The missing step to achieve this is a comprehensive, quick and easy method to measure the local situation in a range of installations and an increased general awareness that costs can be reduced even further.

Goals

This project aims to provide companies with an independent means to assess the corrosion risks in their installations, to increase their awareness and to have them take appropriate preventive actions. To this end, we created a simple, rapid, in-situ sensor system, able to monitor a range of environmental markers over time, to determine the risk of corrosion of steel submerged in water, as well as a statistical method to mine these data for an overall corrosion risk estimate – in short, the SOCORRO system, set at TRL 4.

Approach

In this project, we will implement and demonstrate this whole set-up in several industrial case studies (wind turbines at sea, water desalination/sanitation, ship hulls and ballast tanks, harbour sheet piles, process water) and show the economic opportunities. In addition, we will augment the statistical analysis with an intuitive, practical dashboard tool to present the outflow of information and to convey that risk to the end users. This will raise the TRL to 6 or 7.

Actions:

Development of an algorithm to predict corrosion risks based on water quality parameters
Data gathering and demonstration of the SOCORRO approach at 11 sites
Create more awareness and knowledge on the risks and consequences of corrosion with professionals and the public

Target group

Any company, organisation or government who is confronted with corrosion of steel structures in contact with water and who is looking for a smart way to manage corrosion, based on an objective assessment of corrosion risk over the lifetime of the structure. A number of specific demonstrations are planned during the project:

Port/coastal environment
Offshore steel structure
Ship ballast tank
Waste water treatment facility
Industrial process water

Reference

SOCORRO2/ Interreg2Seas/2S07-031

Role of Sirris

At Sirris, two teams will be actively working on the SOCORRO project: the Metals team and OWI-Lab, with the support of our Data Innovation team. Sirris will co-lead the development of the SOCORRO application together with the Université d'Artois, for which we are ideally positioned thanks to our wide set of complementary expertise on corrosion management, corrosion monitoring, data science and offshore infrastructure. In addition our strong link to the industry will allow us to constantly match the projects developments with the industrial needs. Sirris is also strongly involved in the development of the sensor set-up required to feed data into the SOCORRO corrosion risk algorithm and is responsible for realising a demonstration of the SOCORRO application (sensors and software) at an offshore location.