GE Introduces DM5E Family Of Portable, Ultrasonic Corrosion Monitoring Thickness Gauges
Huerth, Germany - The DM5E family is the latest generation of portable, ultrasonic, corrosion monitoring thickness gauges from GE Sensing & Inspection Technologies. The DM5E series offers significant improvement in performance over previous corrosion thickness gauges in terms of better thickness measurement stability and repeatability at normal and, especially, at elevated temperatures. It has been designed for operation in the harshest of working environments, performing wall thickness measurements on pipelines, pressure vessels and storage tanks in the oil and gas industry, as well as the petrochemical and power generation sectors.
The new corrosion measurement solution is available in three versions; the DM5E Basic; the DM5E; and the DM5E DL. All versions weigh just 223g, including their AA batteries, which allow up to 60 hours operation. They feature an LCD data display, which is backlit to be visible in all lighting conditions, and operation is carried out with one hand using a user-friendly operator interface. This is a sealed, water-tight and dust-proof membrane keypad, which features a minimum of function keys and arrow keys. Navigation through the single level menu is simple and intuitive and the keypad allows access to all calibration, set-up and display modes. A range of displays is available, including normal, where thickness is displayed digitally, Min Scan and Max Scan, where either the minimum thickness or the maximum thickness is displayed after the ultrasonic probe is passed over the wall surface being monitored, and B-scan, which is generated by measuring and recording at 1 point per second to create a B-scan graph showing thickness values graphically.
The DM5E instrument additionally offers the DUAL MULTI operating mode, which allows metal thickness to be measured through coatings. Protective coatings, including paint, contribute significant error to thickness measurements of underlying metal walls when using conventional methods. In addition, the removal of coatings, and their subsequent reapplication, involves considerable cost and time.
The DM5E DL version has a built-in datalogger, with a capacity to store up a massive 50,000 reading in grid and linear files. This makes the measurement data available for further processing. Using GE's UltraMATE software, measurement data files can easily be transferred from the instrument to a PC via a USB interface, for further analysis and storage.
The Basic version can be simply up-graded into a DM5E instrument and both DM5E Basic and DM5E can be field-upgraded to become DL versions.
As Stefan Frank, DM5E product manager at GE, says, "Our new DM5E family allows operators to choose the level of thickness measuring functionality to suit them, while its flexibility allows them to upgrade their instruments whenever they wish. Furthermore, the instruments come with a new range of ultrasonic probes to ensure optimized performance even at high temperatures."
SOURCE: GE Sensing & Inspection Technologies