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Introduction to PEC
Hello! Welcome to Eddyfi’s pulsed eddy current online training course.
Corrosion under insulation (CUI) is possibly the greatest unresolved asset integrity problem in the
industry. Current methods for measuring wall thickness over insulation (liftoff) without removing it all
have severe limitations.
Eddyfi introduced Lyft — a high-performance reinvented pulsed eddy current (PEC) solution. When your
finish this course, you will have the necessary knowledge and skills to efficiently use PEC when inspecting
assets.
During this introductory session, you will; review how to navigate through the course, learn about the
structure and objectives of the course; receive a brief explanation about Pulsed Eddy-current;
be introduced to the short history of PEC; learn about the different applications of the technique; and
understand the strengths and weaknesses of this non-destructive testing technique.
You can easily navigate through this course. The menu on the left allows you to see the various topics. At
all times, you can pause the course. As you advance through the course, you can hit the next button to
skip to the next section, but only if you have completed the section you are in. You can use the previous
button if you want to review some material. You can access some extra resources during the course. When
you leave the interface, you will be offered to come back and resume the course where you left off. Note
that this course is also available on mobiles and tablets, so you can access it from anywhere!
This course will focus on Pulsed-Eddy Current, as developed by Eddyfi Technologies and on the use of the
Lyft product line. This course uses blended learning, which means that part is online, and part is face-to
face.
This online portion of the training will allow you to go over PEC’s principles and concepts at your own
pace, in front of a computer, or on the go, on your mo-bile.
The online course will be divided into 5 sessions;
The first one will be about the PEC principles;
The second session will be a system overview, about the Lyft instrument and probes;
The third session will be about the specific conditions you can encounter on the field;
The fourth session will be about the inspection steps and workflow you will need to follow when using the
Lyft system;
And, finaly, the fift session will present the PECA probe, the new standard and new product from Eddyfi.
This online course includes a few activities and quizzes, and will be completed once you take the final
exam, which allows to you review the theory.
Once you pass the exam, you will receive a certification, which makes you eligible to take part in the
hands-on portion of the course.
You will meet an Eddyfi technologies specialist, and perform hands-on training on various samples with a
Lyft instrument, during a face-to-face training session, either at one of our offices, or directly at your
company.
Again, once you are done with the live training, you will pass an exam and will receive a certification.
Now, what is pulsed-Eddy Current?
Pulsed eddy current, or PEC, is an advanced electromagnetic inspection technology used in detecting
flaws and corrosion in ferrous materials typically hidden under layers of coating, fireproofing, or
insulation, which we call lift off.
It is a technology that allows wall thickness measurement when the probe is not in direct contact with the
surface we want to inspect.
However, take note that PEC is only a screening tool, and provides relative measurement, and does not
provide absolute measurement like Ultrasonic Testing.
Pulsed Eddy Currents are typically used on in service components, like what is found in oil refineries or
chemical plants, splash zone and underwater like we often find on offshore oil rigs, ships or docks. It is
also suitable for water pipelines, structural steel and ammonia based refrigeration piping systems.
It is most commonly used to screen for corrosion under insulation, often referred to as CUI, corrosion
building up under coatings often referred to as corrosion blister or scabs, flow-accelerated corrosion,
corrosion under fireproofing, surface corrosion and more.
Without liftoff, we could simply use Ultrasonic testing for inspection.
However, liftoff is often a constraint:
Non-metallic pipe protection
External corrosion product
Corrosion under insulation (CUI)
Marine growth
When looking to tackle the corrosion problem facing so many industrial asset worldwide, Eddyfi
considered 3 electromagnetic NDT options:
Low-frequency eddy current array (LFECA)
Remote-field array (RFA)
Pulsed eddy current (PEC)
Eddyfi chose PEC because it is the most versatile of all! The range of component thicknesses, insulation
thicknesses and geometries it can apply to is simply unrivaled.
There are multiple strengths to Eddyfi’s PEC system, here are the most important ones;
First, Lyft offers a reduced inspection time. It is Faster than any other PEC system, its grid mapping mode,
is 2 to 10 times faster (usually less than 1 second). Its dynamic scanning mode, unique to Lyft, enables
faster screening or higher resolution scans at typical speeds of around 75 mm/second (3 inches/second).
Second, Is offers reliable and repeatable results. It is less operator dependent, mostly thanks to the
SmartPULSE™ technology, which we will discuss later.
It is Less affected by liftoff variations, weather jacket overlaps and straps it offers better detection of small
defects (dynamic scanning mode) and it is Unaffected by structures above probes.
Besides, it has a wide application spectrum: it can be used on galvanized steel weather jackets, on
corrosion by-products, like scabs or blisters, and on elbows. It can be used through concrete, polymer
coatings, chicken wire, and it allows inspection near nozzles, flanges and pipes supports.
Finally, as you are about to find out, it is easy to Learn and Use, thanks to the C-scan imaging, intuitive
user interface, embedded inspection workflow, and all-in-one solution.
We also have to take into account the weaknesses of the technique. the Current Limitations of Reinvented
PEC Technology are :

- Mass effect near metallic structures;

- Edge effect near the end of the inspected component;

- The impossibility to distinguish between near-side and far-side defects;

- and to detect small-volume pitting;

- Undersizing of flaws smaller than the averaging area of the probe, which we will see in the next section;

And, finally....

- Difficulty to use on elbows fitted on pipes smaller than 200 mm (8 inches) in diameter.
To complete this activity, drag and drop the sentences in the right box, depending if they are true or false.
Well.... you complete the first part of the course !!! Good job!

You can now continue with the session 1.

PEC Acquisition Cycle
Hi! Welcome back for the first session of the course! This first session will be covering the Pulsed-Eddy-
Current principles and concepts, so a little bit of theory, to get started!
It is very important to understand what is going on during an inspection and why, when using the Lyft
system.
During this first session, we’ll be covering the following concepts.
First, we will see what is the Pulsed Eddy Current acquisition cycle.
Then we’ll learn what is an A-scan and how the decay rate is derived from this curve.
Then we’ll learn how C-scans summarize information from multiple A-scans.
And finally, how the footprint and averaging area are defined and how they influence the resolution and
the detection limit.
Eddy currents are basically loops of electrical current. They appear in conductors every time there is a
change in magnetic field. They always oppose to a field variation.
If you feel like you need more information about eddy currents (EC) in general, feel free to visit the
resources section at the top right of the window to look for additional information sources.
What PEC does is to create one sharp electromagnetic transition which induces strong eddy currents in
the inspection target. Information about wall thickness is then extracted from the resulting decaying eddy
currents.
Each acquisition cycle can be decomposed in three main phases: the emission, the cut off and the
reception. Click on the buttons to hear more about each phase.
The first phase is the emission phase. During this phase, the probe injects a magnetic field for long enough
to reach a steady state and penetrate the full wall thickness.
The blue curve here represents the field emitted by the probe.
The red curve shows the field in the material. The field increases in response to the excitation pulse, but
its build-up is slowed down by eddy currents that form in the conductive material, as they form every time
there is a change in the magnetic field.
The eddy currents are strong at first because of the high difference between the field in and out of the
material. But as both fields converge, the eddy currents gradually die out.
At the end of this step, the system reaches a steady state where magnetic fields don’t vary anymore.
The second phase is the cut off phase. When the steady state is reached, at the end of the emission phase,
the electrical current in the transmission coil is turned off. That causes a sudden drop in the magnetic field
surrounding the test piece. Eddy currents appear again in the component, this time to oppose the
magnetic field decay.
Because the transmission coil and electronics in the instrument need to be discharged, this process is not
instantaneous and results in a delay before which the reception phase can start. This is comparable to the
dead zone in ultrasonic testing which results from a time period during which the transducer is ringing
and no signal can be measured. The cut-off phase is roughly 0.5 ms for the Lyft system. It can be longer
depending on the performance of the electronic system and on the probe’s inductance.
The third phase is the reception phase. During this phase, sensors measure the magnetic fields resulting
from decaying eddy currents in the inspection target.
A plot of the received signal amplitude as a function of time, commonly named the A-scan, is then used
to extract information about the inspected wall thickness. Similarly to the emission step, the thicker the
wall, the longer it takes for the eddy currents to decay to zero.
The signal displayed on the instrument is only a fraction of the total cycle time.
The overall length of a cycle depends on the time it takes for the magnetic field to reach the steady state
during the emission phase, then decay down to zero in the test piece during the reception phase.
The wall thickness is the main factor influencing that time: A thick wall needs more time for the magnetic
field to reach full penetration and has a slower decay.
Full cycles can typically take from a few tens of millisecond for thin walls to a few seconds for the thickest
walls.
The wall thickness is not the only factor in play here. Material properties such as magnetic permeability
and electrical conductivity also affect the cycle length.
1.2 A-scan
An A-scan shows the amplitude of a probe’s response in Volt units versus time after the pulse is cut off.
The A-scan represents the variation of magnetic field generated by the eddy currents decaying over time
in the inspection target.
The A-scan plotted in linear Volt and time units is not very easy to read as the voltage may vary over
several orders of magnitude along the A-scan. To improve the clarity of the A-scan and highlight useful
information, the A-scan is typically plot in logarithmic scale on the voltage axis. In other word, the voltage
axis is stretched to better show the small voltage values in the A-scan tail.
The logarithmic scale can also be used for the time axis. A logarithmic time scale highlights the information
at the beginning of the A-scan.
The log-log and the log-lin scales are the most common representations.
Both of these graphs show the same data, but on different scales.
Note that the default representation of the A-scan used in the Lyft application is the log-lin scale which
may differ from other PEC systems. This is the representation that you will get the most familiar with
throughout this training.
Drag the placeholders to identify the corresponding graph.
A typical signal can be divided into two distinct phases.
During the first phase, early in time, eddy currents diffuse as if they were in an infinite wall. The signal
comes from the component’s surface and from the weather jacket, not yet from the bulk of the inspected
wall.
This portion of the signal is best described as a power law, where the amplitude is proportional to the
time to the power of a constant, “-a”. The negative sign represents the decrease in amplitude over time.
On the A-scan, this phase is shown as a straight line for a log-log graph, or as a rapid drop for a log-lin
graph.
During the second phase, later in time, eddy currents diffuse through the volume of the material, thus the
signal comes from the bulk of the inspected wall.
This portion of the signal is best described as an exponential relation characterized by a decay time
constant, called tau. This constant describes how fast the signal decays: the smaller tau is, the faster the
signal fades.
In the Lyft system, tau is called the characteristic decay time, or CDT.
On the A-scan, this phase is shown as a rapid drop for a log-log graph, or as a straight line with a slope
depending on Tau for a log-lin graph.
The point of transition between these two phases is called the bending point. It is an indication of the
thickness of the component.
Most of the PEC systems currently on the market rely, in one way or another, on the drop-off in signal
observed in the log-log scale after the bending point.
In contrast, the Lyft system measures the slope variation around the point of transition in the log-lin graph.
Analysing the slope has two main advantages over the drop method. First, the region of interest in the A-
scan is at an earlier time, having stronger signal and allowing shorter acquisition time. Second, the slope
variation is mostly unaffected by amplitude variations of the signal.
Let’s review – click on the portion of the curve that can be described by a power law.
Now click on the bending point.
Finally, click on the exponential portion of the decay curve.
Decay Rate
To understand how the CDT can be extracted from an A-scan, consider the decay rate. In an exponential
decay relation, the decay rate is the coefficient of the exponent, which is -1 over tau in our case, the decay
rate corresponds to the slope of the exponential portion of the A-scan when plotted in a log-lin graph.
The decay rate represents the speed at which the eddy currents vanish in the test piece.
In general, a thinner wall has a faster decay rate and a smaller CDT.
Fill-in the last statement.
This graph represents the results for four different wall thicknesses. The colors of the result curves match
the colors of the section labels on the component; the result of section 1 is represented by the orange
curve, and so on.
As you can see, the thinner the wall, the faster the signal will drop, which corresponds to a smaller tau.
On the opposite, a thick wall’s signal drop will be slower, corresponding to a larger tau.
We have seen that a change in wall thickness is associated to a change in the decay rate.
In contrast, a change in the distance between the probe and the inspection target, that is a change in
liftoff, has no impact on the decay rate. Only the amplitude of the signal is affected: the larger the liftoff,
the lower the signal.
Beware of very large liftoff variations: excessive liftoff variations can lead to A-scan saturation or signals
which are so weak, they are lost in noise. We will discuss this in detail in section 3.
To estimate the wall thickness from the A-scan, the software finds the best fitting curve on the signal to
extract the relevant parameters. Advanced analytical models were developed to enable an accurate fit
between the actual signal and the parametrised curve. The details of the analytical models are out of
scope for this training but the basic concept is quite simple.
This analysis method is mostly insensitive to liftoff variations because it looks at the signal’s overall shape
and is not influenced by the signal’s intensity. Indeed, the method works best when the signal is not noisy
or distorted. We will disuss the limit of the method in section 3.
It should also be noted that unlike UT, PEC will not return an absolute thickness value. Instead, PEC
measures wall thicknesses relative to a calibration point. Knowing this, if the thickness of the calibration
point is not accuratly input in the system, the absolute thickness result (in millimeters or inches) will also
be inaccurate. On the other hand, the relative thickness results (in percentage of nominal thickness) will
always be reliable.
But everything is not so simple. Non-destructive testing is often indirect testing, and PEC is no exception.
The CDT varies with the material thickness, but it also changes with magnetic permeability and electrical
conductivity which are intrinsic properties of the inspection target material.
In other words, If the wall thickness, the permeability μ or the conductivity σ increases, the CDT also
increases. This also implies that components of equal wall thickness but with different material properties
may not have the same CDT.
For simplicity, and for a given wall thickness, materials with unusually small CDT are referred to as fast,
while those with unusually long CDT are referred to as slow.
Because the PEC technique is sensitive to wall thickness, permeability and conductivity variations all at
once, it cannot automatically discriminate between the effects of these three parameters.
However, it is assumed that within a component the material properties are fairly constant. Considering
this, the instrument calibration factors out the permeability and conductivity when estimating the wall
thickness. These estimations lead to very good results as long as the previous assumption remains true.
On the other hand, if there are large material property variations in the component, wall thickness
measurements will vary even though the real wall thickness is constant.
Material property variations can come from poor manufacturing or magnetization of the component,
which can occur when the part has been tested with MFL or MT. We will see later how to recognize this
phenomenon. When measurements seem to be affected by material property variations, a special set of
actions has to be taken, which will be detailed later in this training.
Remember that PEC is a screening tool! If in doubt, consider double checking the result with, for instance,
a UT inspection port.
On a final note, since the instrument calibration factors out the conductivity and the permeability of the
component, it is very important to calibrate on the inspected component. Therefore, a PEC system cannot
rely on calibration samples because there is no guarantee that those samples have the same material
constant than the inspected component.
This contrasts with UT techniques, where the speed of sound in carbon steel is relatively constant from a
component to another.
Which of these 3 statements are true about the Lyft wall thickness measurement method?
Averaging Area and Footprint
Ok so let’s review a little bit…
The PEC acquisition cycle is composed of three steps, the emission, the cut off, and the reception.
PEC analyses the decay rate, the speed at which the eddy currents vanish in the test piece.
The A-scan is how we call the graph where we plot the response curve
When using PEC, you have to consider that you are not taking point measurements like with UT or lasers.
In fact, the magnetic field used in the emission phase affects quite a large area on the inspected
component.
The resulting A-scan contains the information of the magnetic response from the whole area, leading to
an estimation of the average wall thickness in the area. That is why we call the area: the “averaging area”
The averaging area can be compared to the size of the light beam from a flashlight.
Here is a flashlight acting like a PEC probe. When it is in contact with the object it is shining on, the size of
the beam is minimal. But when the distance between the flashlight and the component increases, so does
the beam diameter.
Move the slider to see how the averaging area varies with liftoff.
Here is a probe seen from the top and the averaging area drawn in blue underneath.
We define the averaging area as the component’s surface generating 90 % of the probe’s response. It is
commonly referred to as the surface seen by the probe. We choose to ignore the remaining 10 % of the
probe’s response because it would consider magnetic fields from very far away and their effects are
negligible.
Remember that the system returns the average wall thickness within the averaging area, not the minimum
value.
PEC is well suited to detect and size general corrosion because the corroded zone is large and fairly
uniform across the averaging area. In the case of irregular wall loss, the technique suffers from
undersizing, meaning that the loss measured by PEC is lower than the real loss. Undersizing happens every
time the defect is smaller than the averaging area. Extremely small defects such as pitting are generally
not detected by PEC.
Like the flashlight beam, the magnetic field intensity is not the same everywhere. The beam fades out as
it gets farther from the center, or from the axis of the probe. To analyze the signal distribution, we take
into account only the part where the field is most concentrated, the area called the footprint.
The footprint is represented here in orange. It is defined as the Full Width at Half Maximum (FWHM) of
the probe’s response. In other words, the magnetic flux in the area covered by the footprint is at least
50 % of the maximum.
The footprint is the main parameter when describing the signal’s spatial distribution. It is used as a
guideline to evaluate many considerations, like the smallest detectable flaw or the measurements’
recommended spatial resolution. More details on the subject will follow shortly.
You can use the footprint to estimate the Averaging area. The averaging area is equal to the footprint
times 1.8.
The footprint and the averaging area both have a correspondence in the ultrasonic world – the footprint
corresponds to a 6 dB, or a 50 % drop in the signal, and the averaging area corresponds to a 20 dB or a
90 % drop from the maximum.
The footprint and the averaging area are defined along the axes of the PEC probe. The signal amplitude
reaches maximum at the center of the probe’s magnetic element, as seen on the image on the left. It
decreases axially following a bell-shaped curve. The two axes of the probe are represented on the image
on the right.
The footprint and averaging area increase with: probe size, coating/insulation thickness and weather
jacket material.
The footprint’s diameter can be estimated with a simple formula. It is approximately equal to 65 % of the
liftoff + the footprint’s diameter at zero liftoff, called FP0. The lengths above each probe represent their
footprint diameter at zero liftoff.
The weather jacket effects on the footprint size are ignored in this formula, but will be considered later.
Try to estimate the footprint in a situation where you are using a medium probe and have a 3 inches liftoff.
One important use of the footprint is to set the grid spacing. One footprint distance corresponds to the
minimum acceptable grid spacing. At this value, there is a 50 % signal overlap between each grid point, as
shown here. It’s important to respect that spacing to cover the whole component and ensure detection
of the smallest detectable flaws. Note that for an inspection targeting generalized corrosion, the grid
spacing can be relaxed to a larger number than the footprint.
An inspection is an organized spatial scan of a component, where each measurement corresponds to a
location. The spatial organization of multiple data points is represented by the C-scan, which is our next
topic.
C-scan
As we just saw, the footprint is used to set the inspection grid spacing, represented here by black dots. To
inspect this surface, the probe is centered on the first dot and a measurement is made. The probe is then
moved to acquire a data point over the second, the third and the fourth point. This process is repeated
for subsequent rows and the c-scan is eventually filled with data.
To summarize, when you take a measurement, you collect an A-scan. From the A-scan, the system extracts
the average remaining wall thickness of the component at this spot. This result is then displayed on the
C-scan as a colored rectangle. The colors are associated with a wall thickness range: by default, 100 %
remaining wall thickness will be displayed in blue while 40 % remaining wall thickness will be displayed in
red, with in between values corresponding to in between colors on the palette.
A completed C-scan will display a two dimensions color coded image representing the thickness of the
component at a spatial resolution of one footprint diameter or higher.
In our example, the fastest A-scan, in orange, corresponds to the lowest remaining wall thickness at 58 %,
displayed also in orange on the C-scan. The slowest A-scan, in black, corresponds to the nominal wall
thickness, displayed in blue on the C-scan.
Resolution and Limit of Detection
Pulsed Eddy Current testing is faced with limitations comparable to that of a digital camera.
The first limiting factor, similar to the number of pixels, is the physical grid spacing, sometimes called the
sampling grid. In our comparison, PEC scanning at lower resolution would be equivalent of using a camera
equipped with a low-resolution detector, which results in images with larger, more visible pixels.
The second limiting factor, like the optics of a camera, is the resolving power of the probe. We use the
footprint metric to describe the resolving power. In our example; scanning with a large footprint would
be equivalent to take pictures while the lens is out of focus. Making the footprint smaller would therefore
be the equivalent of adjusting the focus better on your camera and get a sharper image.
Here is an example to better understand the concepts of resolution and footprint size: Imagine a plate
with its nominal wall thickness everywhere but at its center, where there is perfect square with only 25 %
remaining wall thickness. With a reasonably large footprint and a 5 x 5 resolution to cover the whole plate,
even if one measurement would be dead center of the defect the system would still underestimate it. The
reason is simple: since the averaging area is larger than the defect, the resulting A-scan contains
information of a large volume of the nominal wall thickness that is all around the defect.
Now watch what would happen with a smaller footprint, if we used a smaller probe for instance, without
changing the grid resolution. The result at the center would be more accurate because the averaging area
would be also smaller, so less information of the nominal wall thickness would be included in the A-scan.
The defect would also have less impact on the measurements of nominal wall thicknesses around it.
Instead of changing the footprint size, watch what would happen with a higher spatial resolution. The
resulting C-scan would be smoother, but the minimum wall thickness would be the same.
So what is that detection limit? The rule of thumb is that it represents the smallest volume loss the PEC
system will see. For instance, in the case of the Lyft system, the detection limit roughly corresponds to
15% of the footprint volume.
The footprint volume, in orange, is simply a cylinder with plane surfaces equal to the area covered by the
footprint and a height equal to the wall thickness. The blue cylinders represent defects of 15 % of the
footprint volume. The one on the left is small but deep, while the one on the right is large but shallow;
both are on the detection limit.
As stated earlier, this is a rule of thumb, and it is valid only if the surface of the defect is at least 1/3 of the
surface of the footprint. It was determined without a weather jacket and under typical conditions.
Identify if the following statements are true or false:
General corrosion with a uniform wall loss larger than the averaging area will be properly sized.

Is it true? or false?
Indications bigger than the detection limit will not be detected.

Is it true? or false?
Any defect smaller than the averaging area will be sized accurately.

Is it true? or false?
Good job completing session 1. Now let’s continue with session 2!
Instrument and Probes Overview
Hi and welcome back to Eddyfi Technologies pulsed eddy current online course. Let’s begin session 2!
This session will be an overview of the Lyft system.
We will start by an overview of the Lyft instrument;
Then, about the PEC probes and accessories & especially how to choose the right probe;
Then we will have a quick overview of the inspection workflow and the calibration process;
Then we will discuss the compensated wall thickness algorithm;
And we will finish with a quick practice session.
The Lyft instrument is at the heart of Eddyfi’s pulsed eddy current system.
Hover on the markers to discover some of the instrument features.
Eddyfi designed multiple PEC probes to fit general and more specific inspection scenarios.
The most widely used probes are the 3 standard ones, that we simply call the small, the medium and the
large probe.
They are complimentary in a sense that together, they cover wall thicknesses ranging from 3.25
millimeters, or 1 eighth of an inch, up to 100 millimeters or 4 inches. They also work from zero to 300mm,
or 12 inches, of liftoff.
The 2 parameters, wall thickness and insulation, are not independent though. For instance, it is not
possible to inspect a 4-inch plate with 12 inches of liftoff. We will cover in detail how to choose the right
probe in the next section.
Each standard probe has an integrated remote control to let you operate the instrument from afar, and a
slot to insert an encoder. Other accessories are also available, like
A 15-feet fiberglass extension pole and extension cable to acces out of reach scanning zones.
Probe shoes to support higher temperatures and to damp vibrations when inspecting through
ferromagnetic weather jackets.
Clip-on stabilizers and ergonomic handles,
And a grid mat to quickly mark components.
By the way, what do you think are the orange lines for on the probes?
Identify where to place your hand
Mark the center of the PEC sensor
Provide esthetical contrast
In addition to the standard line of probes, Eddyfi offers application-specific probes.
The tankfloor probe is designed for in service corrosion assessments of atmospheric storage tank annular
plates. It is made of a thin titanium blade meant to be inserted under the outer edge of the tank. It has
unidirectional sensitivity, an integrated remote control and a built-in permanent and durable etched ruler.
Wire encoders can also be used to enable dynamic scans.
The splashzone probe and the underwater probe are designed for underwater corrosion assessments and
are mainly targeting offshore rigs, ships and underwater structures. Such structures are often covered
with marine growth which only add liftoof to the inspection. They don’t have buttons, but they have a
watertightness of 15 and 100 meters respectively. The underwater probe has LEDs to provide feedback
to the diver.
The new specialized patent pending Galvanized Steel probe is designed to inspect insulated structures
protected with Galvanized steel weather jackets, and mitigate the adverse effects of this specific material.
Please take note that the online training only covers standard probes. Although the same principles apply
to application-specific and custom probes, ask your Eddyfi representative to receive specific hands-on
training if you possess a special probe!
Lyft Pro interface
The last activity of this session is to get familiar with the software interface. Since you may not have access
to an instrument just yet, we will work with LyftPro: the desktop version of Lyft.
If you wish, you can watch an introduction video of the Lyft software. You can access the link in the
resources section.
To get started:
Go to eddyfi.com/lyft-pro
Download the software
Open the .zip file.
Enter the password is quS!Echat2uJ
Install Lyft Pro
Open/run the software
Without any data, there is not much you can do with Lyft Pro, so download the Project file, which you will
find in the resources section as well.
The following screencasts will guide you through the analysis steps. Since you have the dataset you could
do the same follow along and try to reproduce that on your own. Do not worry, if you make a mistake,
just go back or start over again, this is what practice is for!
We will go over opening data and file structure, backstage menu, frontstage menu ad set up and report
generation and review in Excel.
Video transcript:
At this point you have downloaded LyftPro, you can open it like this and you also have downloaded a zip
file which is An Inspection Project. If you open the zip file, you have the actual project and three
components inside. Now you need to import this project in LyftPro. There are two ways you can do this:
you can change your working folder path to go match the folder which is on top of An Inspection Project,
or you can copy An Inspection Project and paste it where the actual working folder points, and that’s what
I’m going to do. Now I have in my documents Lyft, I have Default and An Inspection Project, and if I go
here, I click on those dots, I have the choice between Default, which is the actual project that is loaded
and An Inspection Project. If I double click or click OK, I have An Inspection Project loaded with the first
component. Before we go any further we’ll have a look at what is the file structure in Lyft. Every project
should contain at least one component and it can contain more. In this case I have three components
which are the same sample, the scab sample, scanned with three different liftoffs. Because the liftoff is
different, the component is different too and this list actually matches the file structure within the project.
Both are the same. Further, each component has many scan areas, so right now my component is
scab_0Liftoff, and if I look at my scan areas I actually have 3: RefZone, Dyn_Screening, and Dyn_HighRes.
If I double click in the folder, I found those three data sets in here too. Additionally, I have an inspection
master file which helps Lyft figure out what’s going on. I also have an access database where all the
information regarding the indications are stored. This structure is fairly simple: you have the working
folder, in there you have all the projects, and in every project, we have one folder for each component.
And within the component folders, you have all the files that are within the component. There is another
way to add projects to LyftPro, and its through those two buttons: Component Transfer, and Project
Transfer. One interesting thing here, there is no Scan Zone Transfer. If you are in Windows, you can play
with the components and with the projects, but do not ever move individual Lyft data files because Lyft
needs those files all together to be able to figure out what’s going on. If you ever move folders, move only
components or projects, not individual data files. If you hit the Project Transfer button, what it does is
looks for external drives and this is either removable disks, like USB sticks, or an external instrument
connected via Wi-Fi. I have one instrument and one USB stick right now. I will choose the stick and I have
on my USB stick the same inspection project along with other projects too, and you can check it and import
it to your local drive. I won’t do it right now because I already have my inspection project in, but this is
how you would proceed with an instrument to take your data from your instrument to your PC.
Video Transcripts:
Before we go on with the analysis of our scabbing sample, we will quickly go through all the options that
are present in the Backstage. Additionally to the component information, you can create a new
component in the same project. That will be useful if you use LiftPro to prepare a future inspection. You
can open components, you can view the actual component. This one has already been used for scanning,
so you cannot change the definition, but you can view the definition of the component. You can also
duplicate it, you can generate report, we will go back here later, and as we just saw, you can transfer
components and projects. The second tab contains all the information regarding your files, your actual
scans. Right now, we have three scans in the component and you can do a couple things with that: you
can duplicate, and you can also propagate calibration. That is interesting, you cannot do that on the
instrument. If you ever come across a scan that has a better calibration than your reference zone, or you
do not have a reference zone, you can load that zone and use its calibration to propagate it to other zones.
The last option which is interesting here is the Take screen capture with defect report entry. If this is
checked, when we will add indications later a screen shot will be taken and added to the excel report. And
that is sometimes a requirement. The next tab is the Report Summary, where you can customize many
fields and add comments to your future report. The Documentation tab is useful on the instrument. I can
for instance have the user guide in PDF in there. Here, since you are on a computer there is no really use
for this tab. Next is the preferences, where most of the world will want to have the metric measurement
units. The US will stick with the imperial. You can change your logo and manage some shortcuts and this
is another option useful on the instrument, not really on your computer: you can toggle between light
and dark color schemes. Finally, you have the Help tab. Normally you do not need to go there, but if you
ever come across any trouble with your software, you can copy the log to USB on the instrument and send
that to Eddyfi to help us improve the software.
Video transcript:
Now it is time to jump to the Fronstage, and you can do these two ways: either you click on the blue arrow
or you find the same icon in the Scan area tab. The first things we are going to look at in the Frontstage
are two ribbons which are labeled Home and Setup. First thing you want to do is to click on Content. There
actually a couple ways you can change how the C-scan is viewed. I can right click here, and Zoom content,
Zoom to full extend, Adjust the cursor. I can also right click and drag to zoom to a particular section of the
C-scan. If you have a big C-scan, that is how you navigate to it. I will go to Content and then the next thing
is if you have odd looking points, I do not have any right here, but let’s say this one has a black line that
goes down and it is an overspeeding point, I want to discard it. I only hit that button and all the information
disappear. You can reenable any point at any time. The next step is typically to adjust your colors. This
example was made in contact on a scab that has very heavy corrosion, but sometimes, in fact often you
will have liftoff and the indications will not be as clear. You can actually go right now to the third
component which is 2 inches of liftoff and you will see the same indication with a lot less of resolution
and a lot less contrast too. The only way to have a better look at the information and the C-scan is to
change the colors. This window is very flexible. You can add palettes, you can change the range. I let you
play with it. Before we step to the Setup ribbon, I will have a quick word on the Update Scan Zone, which
is basically a “save preferences” button. All the data is saved as soon as you acquire it with Lyft but changes
to the setup like the colors are not saved before either you hit that button or you load another scan zone
and then you get a warning that asks you if you want to save your scan zone. On the Setup tab, you have
two buttons that we will look at right now. The first one is the PEC Autoset. You cannot change it, because
the calibration was made with the instrument but you can confirm what was the characteristic decay time.
In this case it is around 4.6 to 4.8 ms on that sample. The second button is the WT Calibration. Right now,
we are using the probe measurement that was taken somewhere in July of 2017, but on my C-scan I have
a region where my wall thickness is actually closer to 105 %. I want to recalibrate there, because I can also
see that my decay looks good and the slope is a little bit lower. What I will do is click on existing point in
scan zone and I will tag this as nominal and hit calibrate. All the points will be recalibrated according to
that point. LyftPro lets me know by adding that blue rectangle that this point was used for calibration, and
now this point is at 100 %. I can get even more fancy and instead of having only one point, I can use 9
points to do my calibration. I will center my cursor here, and instead of using a single point I will use the
whole area for my calibration. Each point will not be at 100 %, but the average of the sizing of the 9 points
should be roughly 100 %. The software averages all the decay curves and uses this as the new calibration
reference. Finally, let’s say you have made a hole in your sample and you know that this particular point
is not at 92 % but is 95 % because you measured it with UT in contact. What you can do, is use existing
point, but instead of hitting nominal, you can say that it is a known thickness of 95 % from the nominal. If
you hit calibrate, now this point is at 95 %. At any time during this process, you can go back to the original
probe measurement, and you can see here that we went back to a wall thickness of 105 % in this region.
What I will do is to use existing point and recalibrate here and we will continue the analysis from there. A
few other buttons here are information about how the scan was made. You can go back to the different
windows and see how the scan was actually performed. You can also add indication types, you will see
what is the use for this in a minute, and you can also change the display if you ever want to look at things
differently.
Video transcript:
Now it is time to enter indications. This scan is pretty clear: we simply have one indication here and one
other around there. In fact, they are linked together, but we will add two different indications, so we have
more in our report table. I want to surround the deepest portion well and go beyond, because I am going
to be using the CWT and I want the algorithm to work well. If I hold click on this button, I can actually
choose which indication type It is going to be. Here it is scabbing and those types correspond to the
indication right here and you can add one if you want. If I click I get into the Add indication window, and I
have scabbing, and I can add a comment. This is the Lyft portion. I can also compute the CWT from here.
You can see that at the crosshair center the wall thickness is 47 % but the minimum wall thickness as
computed by the CWT algorithm is 27 %. Once I hit OK I have a different number in the CWT information
field. I will do the same thing for my second portion. Now I have two indications that I can see by lifting
that tab, I’m actually going to pin it, and I have those two indications. The positions here are the position
of the center of the indication and you can actually have the absolute position of your cursor at any time
down there. If I move the cursor you are going to see the numbers change. I have in the circumferential
around the pipe direction. If I move my cursor, you see the degrees and the inches change. If I go in the
other axis, it is going to start from zero and it increases probably to up around twenty something. This is
my whole scan zone. I can also add a comment right from here. Once all my indications are entered, I can
go back to the Backstage and generate my report. I have my comment entered earlier, I can customize
fields here too and when I hit Finish, an Excel file is created, and it is one file per component. Back to An
Inspection Project, here I now have the Excel file and the screenshots. I have one screenshot per indication
and they are also pasted in the Excel files. We are going to go and have a look at the Excel file. It contains
multiple tabs, and the more scan zones you have, the more tabs you are going to have. The first point is
always summary of the component and the list of your scan zones. The second tab contains all the defects
for all the scan zones. I only have two but try it and add indications for many different zones, you will see
the names change. The next tab is the RefZone C-scan which are a couple points taken and the next one
is interesting, it contains the C-scans for my dynamic screening scan zone. You actually have four C-scans
and this is because I forgot to show you something. If I go back the the Fronstage on LyftPro, you can
actually choose between four different C-scans. This is wall thickness remaining relative values, wall
thickness remaining in absolute values, wall loss and the CWT C-scan. This C-scan contains the same
information, but when there is an indication, it uses the CWT number instead of the regular wall thickness
to map the colors. The only use for that is to have more vibrant colors when you report. You can see it on
the Excel file that first C-scan is the CWT percentage values, and it looks a lot worse than the other ones.
If you ever want to change the colors, please do that in LyftPro, because right here the colors are
embedded, so they correspond to all those formulas. We do this because Excel only supports three colors
for a scale and we often have more than three. Again, if you want to change the colors do that in LyftPro,
not in excel, that is going to save you lot of time. Lastly you have the screenshots, and if we were to have
other indications, you would have more tabs for the other scan zones. We have made a quick tour of
LyftPro. Please try it for yourself and have a look at other components too. You have 1 inch and 2 inches
of liftoff where you also have an aluminum jacket. You will see that the resolution is a lot less than without
liftoff. Here it is really useful to change your colors to compare to the same scan without liftoff.
Good job! You have completed session 2! Take a break and see you in session 3
Selecting the right Probe
Eddyfi offers a variety of probes to match a range of applications, and the family is continuously
expanding. But our main line of standard probes, as we saw earlier is made of 3 units: the small, the
medium and the large probe.
Also referred to as PEC 025-G2, PEC 089-G2 and PEC 152-G2
as you remember, we discussed in session one how a probe’s footprint at zero lift off is used to calculate
the footprint.
Larger probes have larger sensors, larger footprint at zero lift off and can tolerate more lift off.
On the other end, a smaller probe yields a better resolution (smaller footprint), but tolerates less liftoff.
This graph shows the footprint diameter versus liftoff curves for the second-generation probes. The black
dotted line on this graph shows the overall footprint of the Lyft system for the inspection of a three-eighth
inch-thick plate over a large range of liftoff with the recommended probes. With this setup, it is
recommended to switch from the small probe to the medium probe when the liftoff reaches 2 inches or
higher, and switch again to the large probe when the liftoff reaches 7 inches or higher.
Larger probes can also be used at low liftoff, but it is better to reduce the footprint by using a smaller
probe when possible.
To help you decide which probe to use, Eddyfi provides a probe selection table for the first and second-
generation probes. The tables are developed experimentally by testing the probes on multiple conditions.
They are available on our website and in every probe kit we ship.
To select a probe, you need to know the wall and insulation thicknesses of your component. For instance,
let’s say you have a half inch plate with 1 inch of insulation on top. The wall thickness is 0.5 inch, which is
this line. And the liftoff is this column, which gives the medium probe.
Make sure that you use the right selection table though. For the same conditions with a 2nd generation
probe kit, you are now led to use the small probe. The footprint is the same but they perform better than
the first-generation probes, so they cover more liftoff.
Let’s see if you’ve got it all figured out.
Which probe would you be using if you have a 1 inch wall thickness and a 4 inches liftoff?
The small, the medium, or the large?
Select the correct answer
Right answer = large
The probe selection table is also embedded in the Lyft software to automatically suggest the right probe
during the setup phase, so if you do not actually have the table in hand, do not worry! All recommended
probes have a check mark beside their description. The connected probe will be highlighted in blue, so
you will quickly see if you have the right probe for your setup.
Finally, a word of caution: If the actual liftoff is higher than expected, if the carbon steel is particularly
slow, or if you have galvanized steel covering your component, a larger probe might be needed. If this is
the case, the software will let you know during the calibration phase.
Hover over the markers to find out how these three factors affect the probe size.
Footprint and Minimum Detectable Defect
We learned before that the minimum detectable defect roughly corresponds to 15 % of the footprint
volume. But that doesn’t mean a lot to an asset owner.
Together, we’ll translate this to meaningful information. Take a pen and paper and follow along. We’ll do
the first exercise together and you’ll resolve the second one by yourself.
Watch this video to see how the minimum defect is calculated:
Video transcript:
For this 1st exercise the client has for us a 6 inches standard diameter pipe with 1 inch of coating thickness
or insulation so the important terms here are the wall thickness which is 7.11 mm and the coating
thickness which is around 25 mm. For this exercise we’ll work with the metric system, but you can as well
do it in imperial if you wish. The question the client has for us is: what is the corrosion diameter at 50 %
loss that will be detected. That’s a little bit like asking what is the diameter of the blue cylinder knowing
that the height of the cylinder is 50 % of the whole wall thickness. Here the blue cylinder is the minimum
detectable defect and the orange cylinder is the footprint volume. The first step in answering this question
is just to write here a few variables that we already know. We know what the wall thickness is (7.11 mm),
and we also know what the coating thickness is (25.40 mm). What we are looking for is all the dimensions
of a cylinder, the height and the diameter. The diameter is twice the radius. What we are looking for is
the r or the diameter and we can find it by finding the volume because we know, because we went to
school, that the volume of a cylinder is pi times the radius squared times the height. And what we want
to know here is the radius which will end up being the volume divided by pi and the height, all of that
square root. The only thing I did here is to rearrange the terms to isolate the radius because this is what
we want to know at the end. On the right side of the equation, we know what pi is, we do not know what
the volume is and we do not know what h is. Those are the two terms we are looking for. We will start by
finding h because it is the easiest one. It is stated in the question that we are looking for a 50 % loss, so
we know that h is half of the wall thickness and my wall thickness is 7.11. I divide this by 2, and I get 3.56
mm. Now to find V, I need to know what the footprint volume is, so what I’m going to use is the rule of
thumb saying that the volume of the minimum detectable defect is equivalent of 15 % of my footprint
volume. My footprint is also a cylinder, so that is 0.15 times the radius squared times the height. The
height is the wall thickness, because my footprint stands the whole thickness of my component and my
radius is going to be related to my footprint. My footprint is twice my radius, because the footprint is a
diameter. If I find the footprint, I will find my radius, and my h is 7.11, so I will find the blue volume and
then I will be able to know what I’m really looking for which is r. How do I find my footprint? I need at this
time to go back at my probe selection table to find out that for 1 inch of insulation and for roughly 7 mm
of wall thickness, I get the small probe. And with the small probe, I have FP0 of 35 mm, so my footprint is
going to be 0.65 times my liftoff, 25.4, plus 35 (0.65 x 25,4 + 35). This is 51.51. My radius is this divided by
two, which is 25.755 mm. With this information I can go back and have 0.15 times pi times 25.755 squared
times 7.11; all of this is 15 % of 14000 mm3 is 2222.46 mm3. I can go back to my formula and my r equals
square root of my volume over pi and h which we found at the beginning (3.56), and this is roughly 14
mm. From the beginning, remember that the client wanted the diameter, which is double this. The
diameter he’s looking for is roughly 28 mm. That’s our final answer.
What will you see on the instrument if the probe is triggered right on top of an indication having a volume
of exactly the minimum defect volume?
50 % remaining wall thickness
A remaining wall thickness between 90 % and 95 %
100 % - the system does not detect at the limit of detection
(Quiz feedback : When the indication volume is close to the detection limit, the system will show a slight
reduction in wall thickness. Since the defect is smaller than the averaging area, it is undersized, a concept
we will spend more time on later.)
Remember: for this rule to apply, the surface of the defect must also be at least 1/3 of the surface of the
footprint.
For instance, a single pit at 90% wall loss, or even a hole, will not be detected if the surface is too small.
This limitation is common to all PEC systems.
Before we get to the second exercise, here are some tools available to help estimate the defect size.
First, you could use simplified formulas. The math is the same as you witnessed previously, but the
presentation is optimized to save you time. Choose the situation you are in, either looking for the smallest
diameter or the shallowest detectable depth. Then, replace the terms by the corresponding numbers and
voilà!
However, you will not need to use these formulas on a regular basis, since we have another tool to make
your life easier.
In fact, the main tool used to evaluate the minimum detectable defect size is this table, where you can
select the footprint and the minimum defect depth and obtain the minimum defect diameter instantly.
By selecting the row closest to 51.51 mm for the footprint, and 50 % depth for the defect, we obtain
27mm for the minimum defect diameter.
Be careful! Do not confuse the minimum defect depth with the remaining wall thickness! They are
opposites! A defect depth of 10 % has a remaining wall thickness of 90 %.
You can access this table in the resources tab.
Now, here is a new situation. Do the whole calculation or use the tools provided to select the correct
answers.
You have a carbon steel plate, a wall thickness of 20 mm and an insulation thickness of 50 mm

Select the right probe.

What is the footprint length?
What is the minimum defect diameter of a 25 % depth defect?
Inspection Workflow
The goal of this section is to go through the inspection workflow with Lyft and Lyft probes.
It’s only an overview, so we’ll go over all the details in section 4.
First, you need to configure you instrument. Create the project, then the component and finally the scan
zone.
The Project contains all the information related to your inspection: the data files, the screenshots and the
report.
The Component is the definition of what you’re going to inspect. It is important because the software will
use this information to calculate the footprint, suggest a probe, start optimization and report.
The scan zone defines which portion of the component you will be scanning. The setup defines how you
will be scanning it and with which probe. Your component should be physically marked according to the
setup to help you acquire high quality data.
There can be many scan zones for the same component and many components in the same project. There
is however only one scan and setup per scan zone.
The marking can be anything making sure that the probe is physically scanned according to the pattern
set in the instrument. The mat seen here, masking tape or chalk are all acceptable grid markings. In
dynamic mode, there is only need to mark one axis since the encoder takes care of the other one.
Again: The marking must correspond to the setup resolution entered in the software.
After the marking, you need to do the calibration. Like ultrasound, pulsed eddy current measures a ratio
from a nominal wall thickness. Many instrument parameters and this nominal thickness are defined during
calibration, with the smart pulse and survey mode.

We will review the calibration process in details in the next section.

Then, time for scanning. The data acquisition step is sometimes lengthy, but it’s important to keep looking
for problems like saturation, low signal or overspeeding.
Now data analysis can be done on the instrument or on a windows computer using LyftPro, although it’s
preferable to do at least a first analysis before leaving the job site.
Typical actions done during analysis are changing the calibration point, adjusting the color palette, adding
indications (and report entries) and computing compensated wall thicknesses.
Finally, an Excel report can be generated from Lyft and LyftPro to deliver to your client.
Set up
Watch this video to se how the set up is done in Lyft.
Let us go through the steps needed to get our inspection started with Lyft. First, turn your instrument on,
and let it boot. Meanwhile, you can plug the probe you intend to use.
Once the unit is ready, create a project folder that will contain all the information related to your
inspection: the data files, the screenshots and the reports.
The next step is to create a component. Components are defined by their geometry, as well as by their
insulation and weather jacket. Each geometry contains specific metrics. I will be scanning a 10 inches
diameter pipe having a standard schedule. My pipe sample is 26 inches long and there is no insulation nor
weather jacket. Make sure that the origin matches the way you intend to scan. It is important to define
what you are going to inspect because the software uses this information to calculate the footprint, to
suggest the probe, to start calibration optimization and to report. At this point you need to select the
second tab at the left of the screen to create a scan area, also called a scan zone. The scan zone defines
which portion of the component you will be scanning. It is referenced from the component origin set
earlier. The first scan zone is usually a reference zone covering the whole component to perform your
calibration.
Next step is the setup creation. A component can contain many scan zones but there is only one setup
per zone. The setup defines how you will be scanning, and with which probe. In this case I have the small
generation 2 probe plugged in, and I am in a 60 Hz environment. I am going to use the default settings for
now, because it is a calibration scan zone. But notice that you can change your scan pattern, and that will
reflect on the diagram on the right.
We will get back to this screen later on.
When the setup is completed, I am transferred to the front stage of the Lyft application, and I am ready
for calibration.
Calibration
Let’s have a closer look at the calibration process.
Calibrating Lyft is a 3-step process that has been combined into what we call the SmartPULSE™. Whenever
you launch the SmartPULSE™ routine on the instrument, you in fact trigger the 3 calibration steps one
after the other.
You can also trigger each step independently.
Let’s see what the purpose of each step is.
PEC Autoset defines the optimal PEC parameters based on in-situ physical tests.
The algorithm starts by using the component information provided during the setup to launch a first pulse.
When analyzing the response, it incrementally changes parameters such as pulse duration and the
receiver gain to avoid saturation, improve signal-to-noise ratio and to ensure that the inspection target is
fully penetrated.
It also sets A-scan settings such as start time and duration.
Finally, PEC Autoset will fine tune a filter used to remove the noise coming from the surrounding power
line. Typically, the power line has a frequency close to 50 or 60 Hz, depending on which country you are
in. It is good to know that PEC Autoset will converge to the optimal settings even if the component was
incorrectly described during the setup. As stated before, if the resulting gain setting is too high, a warning
message will pop-up suggesting that a different probe may be more appropriate.
Wall Thickness Calibration uses the average of 32 pulses to define a reference wall thickness. This
reference is typically 100 % of the nominal wall thickness, but it can be set to a different percentage. For
instance, if you have access to a zone measured with UT, you could calibrate there and set the calibration
to a known thickness.
Wall Thickness Calibration can be re-done after the inspection on any point or area of the C-scan. Doing
this typically yields a slightly noisier reference curve because the averaging is rarely 32 during a scan. It is
also possible to revert to the original calibration at any time.
Re-doing the Wall Thickness Calibration is useful to fine-tune your results, but it cannot be used alone to
avoid saturation. Saturation can only be eliminated by performing PEC Autoset.
Repeatability optimization triggers 32 pulses and evaluates how many results need to be averaged to have
an acceptable variability. If it was triggered through the SmartPULSE™, it re-uses the pulses from the wall
thickness calibration step to save time.
The default averaging will be the lowest even number with a variability of less than 1 %, but you can always
choose a higher averaging to increase the data quality, or a lower one to increase the acquisition speed.
The polarity is inverted every pulse to get a more uniform response. This is why we consider only even
averaging values. Using only 1 pulse is an exception for users that want to go very fast, at the expense of
lower data quality.
These calibration routines were designed to be as operator independent as possible, but there is still one
very important factor that an operator must consider: finding the best calibration spot. Here are some
tips to find the best point to calibrate on:
Try to find an area with near nominal wall thickness. Using your knowledge of the inspected component
and the known damage mechanisms, try to avoid areas that are defect-prone
Stay away from potentially interfering components such as other metallic structures or edges
Target a region that is more likely to have low insulation or coating thickness
Avoid jacket overlaps
Try to stay away from sources of vibrations.
The Survey Mode is used to quickly validate the best area to calibrate on.
When you take measurements in the Survey Mode, results are shown but not recorded and only the A-
scan is displayed.
Here is an example of a procedure one could do to optimize the SmartPULSE™ calibration:
First, find a suitable location on the component according to the tips mentioned earlier and perform a
SmartPULSE™. Then, using the Survey Mode, try to find a point on the component where the thickness is
higher than your nominal wall thickness. If you find any, perform the SmartPULSE™ on it and look again
for a thicker point. Repeat this procedure until you find the thickest point, where the final Smart pulse will
be performed.
Let’s recap the main calibration steps, try to place them in the right order.
Find a suitable calibration location;
Perform a first SmartPULSE™;
Browse through the component to find the best calibration area;
Perform the SmartPULSE™ again.
Video transcript:
The first calibration step is to find a suitable area on the component to perform the initial calibration. In
this case it is easy because we see the corroded areas, but with insulation it is often a guess. Try to avoid
defects, to stay away from other metallic structures, to avoid jacket overlaps and straps, and stay away
from sources of vibration, like pops. Perform the SmartPULSE™ once where you think the wall thickness
is near nominal and where the insulation thickness is low. After the SmartPULSE™, enable the Survey
Mode and look for a better reference point across your component. The better reference point has higher
signal and a slower decay rate. Once you have defined the optimal reference point, run another
SmartPULSE™ there. This will be your final calibration. Acquire a few data points to make sure that your
scan zone will be saved and for future reference. In the backstage, duplicate your RefZone scan zone,
change the name and keep the calibration. In this case I plan to create a screening dynamic scan. I keep
the calibration and change the scan zone to half of the pipe circumference. Before I proceed, I change my
scan settings to screening mode and since the mat I am using is premarked at every inch, I change my
resolution accordingly. Make sure that your component is physically marked according to your setup
settings. This was not important for calibration, but it is critical for the scans to reflect reality. Back to the
frontstage, and with the encoder clipped on, we’re ready to scan.
Acquisition
You can watch a demonstration video of how to do the actual scan, or acquisition with Lyft.
To start a dynamic scan, simply press on the play button. The green LED will start to flash, indicating that
it is ready to acquire. While performing your scan, use the index button to change line. Pay attention to
the lights on the probe during your scan. The green LED flashes quickly when you reach the end of the
scan zone. The red LED lets you know when you are over speeding. You can always go back and rescan to
fix this issue. The screen should also be monitored for additional warnings in the info field section and
monitoring the A-scan for saturation, overspeed and noise. All of this can be done by a single experienced
operator, but it is most often done by a team of two.
When you scan is complete, it is time for analysis. This step can be performed on the instrument or on a
computer using LyftPro.
Compensated wall Thickness – The Basics
Pulsed eddy current has limitations, like any other technique. One of them is the under sizing of flaws
smaller than the averaging area. Eddyfi developed a post processing technique called the Compensated
Wall Thickness, or CWT, to overcome that limitation. In this section, we will explain how the CWT works.
First, let’s recall an important notion: each result that you get is the average wall thickness within the
averaging area. In other words, the system considers that there is only one thickness in the averaging
area. When a defect is smaller than the averaging area, using the CWT will tell the system that the actual
signal results from a combination of two different thicknesses: the remaining wall thickness of the defect
and the nominal thickness.
N/A
The actual signal, in green, combines information from the nominal wall thickness signal, in blue, and the
defect signal, in red. The red curve would be the actual signal if the averaging area was smaller than the
defect.
The CWT algorithm decomposes the signal to estimate the minimum wall thickness within the averaging
area.
[1st portion of slide] To optimize the sizing of a defect, the CWT needs more than one A-scan. When you
flag a defect smaller than the averaging area, make sure to include the whole defect and its surrounding.
The algorithm will find the defect contribution that has the best fit with all the points within the region
under analysis. Even if you run the CWT on a region, you only get a single depth measurement. [2nd
portion] This strategy works well in theory, but like any algorithm that amplifies a small contribution from
a signal, it’s susceptible to noise. Analysing multiple A-scans will also reduce the impact of noise.
Let’s have a look at the impact of the compensated wall thickness algorithm on a 12 millimeter thick
laboratory plate. The average wall thickness measured by PEC is 88 %, 62 % and 80 % respectively for
defects A, B and C. These values are also called single thickness values since only one thickness is fitted
over the A-scan curve.
These values are pretty far from reality because of the size of the averaging area. Remember that PEC is
a screening tool, not a sizing tool. In this case, all the indications are detected since there is a clear
deviation from the nominal. It is not however possible to know if the indication is small and deep, or large
and shallow.
When the CWT is applied however, the sizing values become much closer to reality. For instance, the
single thickness measurement on defect B was off by 30 %. With the compensated wall thickness, it is off
by only 2 %. The red dashes represent the region over which the CWT was performed.
This demonstration was made on near-perfect samples. But how does the compensated wall thickness
fare with real corrosion?
The second sample is a real piece featuring scab corrosion, also called blistering. Scab corrosion is very
common in offshore applications. Corrosion material bulges under the elastomer paint, creating a layer
of very flaky corrosion material acting as liftoff and preventing the use of ultrasonic testing.
The first map was made by scanning a UT probe from the inside of the pipe, which is normally not feasible
on active components. Two small spots were found at around 30 % remaining wall thickness.
The second map shows conventional, or single thickness pulsed eddy currents. This map was made
without additional liftoff, as you will see later in this lesson. Remaining wall thickness is measured at
around 55 %. Yet with the compensated wall thickness algorithm, values are much closer to reality.
The result is even more striking with 63 millimeters of liftoff, where the sizing goes from 75 % to 40 %.

In many conditions, it will find a thickness value within 10 % of reality. This performance is however not
guaranteed, it’s dependant on the quality of the original data. The next lesson exposes the many rules to
follow when using the CWT in order to obtain the best possible performance from the algorithm.
Yet with the compensated wall thickness algorithm, values are much closer to reality.
The result is even more striking with 63 millimeters of liftoff, where the sizing goes from 75 % to 40 %.

In many conditions, it will find a thickness value within 10 % of reality. This performance is however not
guaranteed, it’s dependant on the quality of the original data. The next lesson exposes the many rules to
follow when using the CWT in order to obtain the best possible performance from the algorithm.
In summary, the compensated wall thickness is a tool to help evaluate the real minimum wall thickness of
an indication __________ than the averaging area.
Fill in the blank.
Compensated wall Thickness – The Rules
The compensated wall thickness algorithm fits a defect and the nominal contributions to the actual signal.
Consequently, it works best on isolated defects surrounded by near-nominal walls, like these situations.
The CWT is affected by edge and mass effects. Mass effect, caused by a flange for instance, is especially
tricky because the algorithm might use the mass signal instead of the nominal signal for its calculations.
The depth of the defect would thus be overestimated. There is an option in the Lyft system to attenuate
this oversizing; it will be covered in the next lesson.
Defects embedded in general corrosion are also a challenge for the CWT since none of the two main
thicknesses present are at the nominal value.
Sometimes, the CWT cannot even be computed. In this section, we go through all the reasons why you
could get a grayed-out Compute button in the Add Indication window, and how to avoid the warning
messages.
This first rule relates to the size of the cursors.
Indeed, the algorithm needs at least 9 valid points to proceed. The cursors also need to cover at least 3
rows and 3 columns.
Another requirement is that the deepest point must not be on the edge of the selection. It’s always best
to totally surround an indication.
There is also a minimum threshold on the CWT. The purpose of the algorithm is to improve the sizing on
visible indications, not to increase the detection limit of the system.
If the standard measured loss is too small, the CWT will either be grayed out or it will not converge and
the result will not change from the single thickness measurement.
The CWT needs many overlapping points to extract the same defect curve from many A-scans.
As a consequence, the grid resolution must be at least half of a footprint in the scan axis, and 1 footprint
in the other axis.
The last rule applies only if you use sub-components. When you add a sub-component to the C-scan, you
can change the calibration within its boundaries. The CWT algorithm will only work if all the points in the
selected region have the same calibration. Thus, the CWT box cannot include a sub-component boundary.
Try to identify if this selection is valid.
How about this one? Is the selection valid?
And this one? What do you think?
Edge and Mass effects
Welcome to the third session of this course. In this session, we will get into the details!

We will learn;

What are edge and mass effects, and specific considerations regarding elbows and small pipes.

The impact of aluminum and galvanized steel weather jackets.

How to identify and mitigate vibration sources.

What is metallic component interference and how it impacts PEC signals.

The effects of liftoff variations within a scan.

And the system’s speed limitations.

PEC measurements are disturbed by nearby geometries such as nozzles, flanges and the ends of a
structure.
Geometry variations affect PEC’s measurements because the amount of metal in the averaging area
changes. If there is less metal, we talk about an edge effect. If there is more, we talk about a mass effect.
Roughly, measurements begin to vary when the edge or mass is at a distance of one footprint from the
center of the probe sensor.
Edge effects are not frequent in real inspections, but they generally are an issue on small demonstration
samples, like the one pictured here.
It is hard to differentiate an edge from an indication since in both cases, the measured wall thickness
decreases.
Holes are closely related with edge effects. From a PEC testing perspective, a hole is a combination of:
[First part of the slide:] The edge effect from the surrounding of the hole.
[Second part of the slide:] A drop in amplitude caused by the absence of steel. No eddy currents can be
formed in the hole, no signal can therefore come from it. This causes a drop-in amplitude. A bigger hole
will cause a bigger drop in amplitude.
PEC is not designed to detect holes but indirect detection is possible because it is usually surrounded by
severe corrosion.
The mass effect produces the opposite impact – a strong and slow additional signal covers the original
component we are interested in.
Here is a mass effect example, the case of a flange attached to a pipe. From the probe’s point of view, the
pipe wall is thin and far in comparison to the flange. The flange returns a strong signal because it is
physically closer. On top of this, the signal is slow decaying since the flange is usually thicker than the pipe.
A flange thus covers the pipe signal and it is therefore not possible to identify corrosion localized right at
the junction between the pipe and the flange.
Here is an example of corrosion near a flange. This test pipe was designed to have a gradually decreasing
wall thickness on its right side, with a minimum thickness of 50 % at the edge of the flange. The C-scan of
this component shows the nominal thickness on the left, labeled 1, the corroded section in the rightmost
half of the scan, and the flange on the far right, labeled 2. If you look carefully at the corroded section,
from left to right, the signals drop gradually to a minimum of 78 %, but then increases as the
measurements are taken closer to the flange, up to a maximum of 107 %! The flange signal completely
conceals the corrosion signal at the far-right section of the scan.
If the corrosion was not uniform along the circumference, you would see a variation in the signals near
the flange. This would be a hint that there is corrosion even if the wall thickness values are very high.
What happens if you apply the compensated wall thickness algorithm to an indication featuring mass
effect?
It will overestimate the defect depth.
It will underestimate the defect depth.
Nothing. The right remaining wall thickness will be found.
Using the CWT in this example gives a minimum wall thickness of 28.6 % even though the real wall
thickness is 50 %. This oversizing is due to the strong flange signal that the algorithm considers to be from
the nominal thickness, thus giving a result worse than reality.
The system has a tool to reduce the impact of the mass effect on the CWT. Before computing the CWT,
check the “Mass Effect” box and indicate where the mass is relative the indication box. The CWT will use
a reference line, in orange, to compensate each column separately. It will assume that every point on the
orange line is 100 %, so that any increase in signal will be subtracted to the other points of the same
column.
This additional tool helps, but is does not totally fix the overestimation. Also, the bounding box needs to
surround the indication entirely – it cannot work for indications spanning 360 °
Also, a flange is a common mass effect example, but pipe saddles, supports, nozzles, T pipes and welded
I-beams are other interfering structures that will create mass effect.
Finally, masses only interfere if they cross the probe’s averaging area. For instance, in a typical pipe rack,
the upper pipe is not considered as a mass for Eddyfi’s PEC probes because the magnetic field is oriented
totally downwards. It is not the case for most other PEC probes which are flooding the volume around
them with magnetic fields and are therefore picking up interference from components surrounding the
probe anywhere within as much as 10 inches or 250 mm.
In some uncommon situations, a mass may interfere with the PEC probe even outside the averaging area,
for instance, if the mass is much nearer to the probe than the inspection target.
Although we have considered the footprint and the averaging area to be circular up to this point, it was
only an approximation. In fact, the averaging area spreads more on the sides than on the probe axis, as
shown by the blue curve.
So, it is always best to approach a mass head on, where the averaging area is the smallest, to minimize its
impact on the signal.
In summary, edge and mass effects start to impact the measurement when the center of the probe is
roughly one _______ distance away from them.
The signal decreases due to _______ effects and ________ with mass effects.
To have an impact, edges and masses need to lie in the PEC ________.
Now, download the Session 3 Dataset zip file in the resources tab and add the project to your LyftPro
working folder. You will find many components in this project that will be discussed in this session. The
Pipe with Flange component contains the scan presented earlier. Have a look!
Geometries
In addition to edges and masses, two special component shapes are worth spending some time on.
The first is the elbow shape. It requires special attention because the C-scan is a little bit trickier to analyze:
The pipe wall thickness may be different from the elbow wall
Welds may appear in the C-scan
AThe wall is often thinner on the extrados than on the intrados.
There is an elbow component in the dataset you have downloaded featuring general thinning of the
extrados. In fact, the scan was made on the elbow pictured here, and the thinning was confirmed with
ultrasonic testing. Have a look!
There is a physical challenge in scanning an elbow. The extrados is smooth, but the intrados curvature is
sometimes very tight.
The Extrados is also generally more prone to thinning than intrados because of flow accelerated corrosion
or erosion.
For a single inspection on the whole elbow, it is recommended to calibrate on the side. If during your
inspection you have saturated or weak signal, you might have to separate your inspection in two scan
zones. Elbows with diameters of roughly 10 inches or smaller are usually difficult to inspect with PEC. In
such cases you may consider limiting the scan to the extrados, or backing it up with alternative inspection
techniques.
Lyft integrates an elbow component to handle the shape variation between the intrados and the extrados.
The C-scan is basically a diamond where the wide portion corresponds to the extrados and the thin portion
corresponds to the intrados. The vertical axis is the pipe length, and the horizontal axis matches the
circumference.
The scan starts in the intrados along the pipe axis, as shown by this diagram.
When inspecting elbows, you may get:
[Leftmost portion of the side]: Geometric interference, especially when running an intrados dynamic scans
along the axis. In such cases, the signal can be affected by liftoff variations due to the probe casing and
cable interfering with the inspection surface. Work around solutions may include removing the encoder
and perform a grid scan instead or scanning with the probe perpendicular to the elbow axis. If you choose
the latter solution, try to avoid rocking motions with the probe, it might change the decay curve shape.
[Rightmost portion of the slide]: It should also be noted that the algorithm used to extract the wall
thickness information from the A-Scan signal is based on an imperfect analytical model of the signal.
Consequently, geometry variations may be interpreted as wall thickness variations by the Lyft software.
You should therefore be aware that wall thickness readings may vary from an intrados reading to an
extrados reading, even if the wall thickness is the same.
The second special geometry we will discuss briefly are small diameter pipes, since before there was a
widespread belief that PEC was limited to 4 inches pipes.
By running numerical simulations and experiments on 1, 2 and 3 inches carbon steel pipes, we were able
to determine that pipes with an outer diameter as small as 25.4 mm (1 inch) could be inspected with
pulsed eddy currents. In these situations,
The footprint and minimum volume concepts are still valid
As the pipe diameter decreases, the footprint wraps around the circumference and stops to expand in the
circumferential axis.
Now that is interesting. These images represent the field intensity on a 2 inches, a 4 inches and a 6 inches
pipe each having 2 inches of insulation. On the smallest pipe, you can see that the footprint, represented
by a black line, spans the total circumference of the pipe, making the detection of a defect on the opposite
side of the probe possible.
For more on this, read the application note in the resources tab about using pulsed eddy current on small
diameter pipes
When the liftoff is high enough for the footprint to wrap around the pipe, defects on the opposite side
can be detected. This is called the small pipe regime.
Consider this example: A small pipe has a defect on top of it. We measure the wall thickness on the front
side and on the opposite side of the defect for various liftoffs. The results are presented with the orange
curve and the blue curve, respectively.
When on the front side of the defect, the measured wall thickness increases with liftoff because the
averaging area includes more nominal wall as the liftoff increases, thus undersizing the defect
When on the opposite side of the defect, the measured wall thickness first decreases with liftoff, because
the averaging area includes more of the defect as the liftoff increases. Between 2 and 3 inches of liftoff is
the small pipe regime, where the defect is clearly detected by the system. Then, with higher liftoff, the
measured wall thickness increases as more nominal wall thickness is included in the averaging area. The
small pipe regime be can be exploited as an opportunity to screen a pipe faster by running a single scan
to cover its full circumference. It is also useful to inspect less accessible small pipes.
Here is an example on a pipe of 50.8 mm, or 2 inches, nominal OD and 25.4 mm or 1 inch insulation. The
pipe features four 90 ° flaws of various lengths and depths on its left side, and three 360 ° flaws on its
right side, as you can see on the lab benchmark. The high-resolution C-scan of the complete pipe is shown
at the top of your screen. Now consider that there was a single line in the C-scan. We notice that the
leftmost defect would have been detected regardless which line was scanned. That is the effect of the
small pipe regime. The other 90 ° defects are only detected on the front side because they are too small.
To learn more about nominal pipe size, visit the link in the resources tab or click just there.
But before we switch gears and introduce the effects of weather jackets, you should know that whenever
you create a pipe or tube component in Lyft, the curvature is taken into account.
The footprint length is always defined on the component’s surface. It is okay to just shift that length over
the insulation on a plate, but on a pipe, that leads to oversampling.
So instead, Lyft projects the angle covered by the footprint on the outer surface of the component. That
creates a new variable called the circumferential footprint, and it is displayed in the Excel report.
Weather jackets
It is common, especially on piping components, to encounter weather jackets. The goal of these thin
metallic layers is to protect the insulation from the outdoor environment, but they sometimes have an
adverse impact on pulsed eddy current inspections.
Weather jackets are mainly made from three metals: stainless steel, aluminum, and galvanized steel.
We will spend no time on stainless steel jackets since the impact of this non-magnetic and relatively poor
conductor metal is negligible on decay curves.
Inspectors do need to take aluminum and galvanized steel components into account though. Aluminum
is visible early on the A-scan and galvanized steel limits greatly PEC’s efficiency. Let’s look at their impact
more closely.
Aluminum weather jackets are most common in the Americas. The main consequence of non-
ferromagnetic aluminum is to create an additional fast decaying signal on the A-scan, as pictured here.
Since the depth information comes mainly late on the decay curve, Lyft’s strategy is to be blind to the
aluminum signal. To do this, the system adds a delay to the reception phase of the PEC cycle.
With this additional delay, aluminum jackets are managed pretty well. There is a side effect though – since
the A-scan starts later, very thin components that have a fast decay might not be measurable.
In which situation might the calibration algorithm not converge?
1 mm aluminum jacket on a 25 mm thick component
0.5 mm aluminum jacket on a 6 mm thick component
1 mm aluminum jacket on a 3 mm thick component
In case c), the characteristic decay time, or the material’s time constant, is similar to the jacket delay. This
means that most of the decay already happened before the system even started to read. By trying to hide
the aluminum signal, the component signal is also hidden.
So when the jacket delay and the material’s time constant are close, PEC Autoset might not converge.
These two metrics are displayed when you click on PEC Autoset in the Lyft software.
Galvanized steel weather jackets are mostly seen in Europe and Asia. They have a strong negative impact
on PEC signals. Galvanized steel is ferromagnetic and it interacts with the field created by the PEC probe.
It absorbs a portion of the pulse and some of the field re-emitted by the component, lowering greatly the
signal detected by the probe. Also, a small portion of the signal actually comes from the galvanized steel
weather jacket itself. The jacket behaves like a small component and it emits signal too.
The second net impact of the galvanized steel jacket is an enlargement of the footprint.
Finally, when the jacket is not firmly maintained in place, it also tends to vibrate with every pulse.
Okay, that’s a lot to consider. We will review the practical implications of these effects individually.
As you can see on the images, the field intensity into the component is greatly reduced by the addition of
a layer of galvanized steel.
By absorbing part of the pulse’s energy, galvanized jackets force the Lyft instrument to use a higher gain,
and sometimes more averaging too. You might be forced to use a bigger probe because the gain needed
increases due to galvanized steel.
Galvanized steel jacketing over the inspected component redirects the magnetic field in such a way that
the footprint cone becomes wider, resulting in a larger footprint. This increases the impacts of edge effects
too.
Taken together, signal attenuation and footprint enlargement can be compared to an increase in liftoff.
In fact, when there is galvanized steel in the component, Lyft software adds an equivalent of 40 mm (1.5
in) of liftoff per 0.5 mm (0.02 in) of galvanized steel. Take this into account when you select your probes
for a galvanized steel inspection!
The third negative impact of galvanized steel is vibration. Because of its ferromagnetic properties, the
galvanized steel will vibrate every time the PEC probe emits a pulse, generating an oscillating noise on the
A-scan. You can see the effect of vibrating galvanized steel on this graph. The result in black would not
lead to a reliable sizing. This noise cannot be averaged out because it is synced with PEC pulses. In other
words: The noise signature is exactly the same each time you get a data point in the same conditions.
The only way to get rid of vibrations is to physically limit the jacket’s ability to move relatively to the probe.
This is possible by increasing the mechanical coupling between the probe and the jacket.
We do not recommend using the dynamic scan mode on galvanized steel jackets, mainly because it is
much more difficult to damp the vibrations while moving.
There are two methods to increase the mechanical coupling between the probe and the jacket. First, you
can use the high temperature probe shoe. This helps in two ways: it will add a 5 mm liftoff to the probe,
weakening the magnetic coupling between the probe and the jacket, but the main advantage is that the
shoe will absorb the vibrations. The second method is to apply pressure on the probe while you take
measurements, restraining the vibrations in the jacket. Obviously, you can combine the two methods for
better results.
Even though the probe shoe helps for better inspections through galvanized steel with standard probes,
it doesn’t improve the inspection performance in terms of footprint. The +40 mm, or +1.5 inch of
equivalent Liftoff rule still applies.
Before performing an inspection on galvanized steel with a standard probe, you should read carefully the
blog article on The three Major Effects of Galvanized Steel on Pulsed Eddy Currents in Corrosion Under
Insultation Inspection. You will find it in the ressources tab.
The best option to do PEC inspection through galvanized steel is to use Eddyfi’s patent pending GS
specialized probe. It emits a strong constant magnetic field to neutralize the adverse effects of the
ferromagnetic weather jacket. Its detection and sizing performances are equivalent to those of a standard
probe without the weather jacket and there is no need to correct the footprint!
Eddyfi’s patent pending GS specialized probe has the same properties as the medium standard probes
with a few noticeable differences:
It is larger and longer
It is heavier
It will be attracted to ferromagnetic materials, including galvanized steel jackets and carbon steel
components
It is only useable in grid mode
It has a remote control installed on the cable to trig data acquisition
Click on the markers to discover the features of the GS probe
With special equipment comes special responsibilities! Inspecting with Eddyfi’s patent pending GS
specialized probe requires your full attention to the following advices:
First: The probe base will be strongly attracted to any ferromagnetic materials. Anytime you bring it close
to a carbon steel component, magnets or even the galvanized steel jacket itself; handle it with care and
be sure to keep any body parts away from the probe’s surface. For the same reason, it will be much safer
to attach the probe surface to the provided steel plate during transportation.
Secondly: It is recommended not to bring the probe in close contact to the inspected components,
otherwise it may become magnetized. General guidelines for this would be not to bring the probe within
less than 12.7 mm, or 0.5 inch of the component. If close contact is necessary, or there was an accidental
contact between the probe and the inspected component, demagnetization of the component should be
performed.
Lastly, Eddyfi’s patent pending GS specialized probe is affected with movements while acquiring. While
the probe is acquiring, any probe or jacket movement will induce significant noise in the PEC signal, making
the affected data points useless. Make sure that the probe and jacket are still while acquiring. The remote
button installed on the cable should promote the probe’s stillness as you won’t need to push on the probe
to trip data acquisition.
Vibration Sources
We have seen that mechanical vibrations induced by the probe on galvanized steel have an adverse impact
on PEC measurements. External sources of mechanical vibration can also influence pulsed eddy current
signals. Potential vibration sources include nearby pumps and rotating machines, as well as flow-
generated vibrations and cavitation.
The main difference between these two sources is that pumps typically create noise concentrated around
a few discrete frequencies, whereas flow-generated vibrations tend to create wide bandwidth vibration.
Indeed, the impact of mechanical vibration on sizing all depends on the frequency content. High-
frequency vibrations do not affect performances of the algorithm. Even if the oscillation is visible on the
A-scan, as long as you see 20 or more vibration periods on the A-scan, the frequency is high enough not
to impact the fitting algorithm. Another way to validate if the frequency is high enough is to display the
best fit curve on the instrument.
Low-frequency vibrations are more problematic. When less than 10 vibration periods are visible on the A-
scan, the frequency is too low for the fitting algorithm and the sizing will become erratic – the c-scan will
be noisy.
Sometimes, the vibration will also induce saturation at the start of the C-scan. When that happens, you
will get no sizing at all.
If it is impossible to reduce the noise amplitude by limiting the vibration, the best alternative is to increase
the system averaging when you perform the repeatability optimization calibration.
Unlike galvanized steel induced vibrations, external vibrations are not synced with the PEC pulse, so
increasing the averaging will remove most of the noise, as you can see on the A-scans on the left of your
screen with their corresponding C-scan on their right. The results on the top were taken with an averaging
of one, while the results on the bottom were taken at the same spot with an averaging of 24.
Of course, increasing the averaging will also increase the measurement time.
In summary,
___________ vibration does not impede PEC sizing ability, but __________ vibration is a problem.
Increasing averaging is a __________ to a noisy environment, as long as the vibration is _____________
with the excitation pulses.
Metallic component interference
In addition to weather jackets, other metallic structures can be present in the vicinity of the component,
potentially creating signal interference. We will talk about four of them: Chicken wires, welded wire mesh,
rebars and heat tracers.
Chicken wires come in a thin mesh and it’s used to wrap insulation. It is ferromagnetic, but since the metal
volume is very small, it is generally not a problem. However, if it is not tight enough, the PEC pulse might
induce vibration in it, like with galvanized steel jackets.
As for galvanized steel, applying pressure on the probe and using the shoe might help in damping
vibrations due to chicken wire.
In most cases with chicken wire, results in dynamic mode have a lower repeatability. We recommend that
you make the proper verifications to make sure that the data quality is suitable for your inspection before
using the dynamic mode on chicken wire.
Welded wire mesh has a bigger cross-section; therefore, it has a greater potential to interfere with PEC
signals. However, it is mainly used as concrete reinforcement, so it is not prone to vibration. It is also
generally midway between the probe and the inspection target, so far enough from the probe to avoid
significant interference.
Here is an example on how the addition of wire-mesh after calibration will affect the signal.
The welded wire mesh volume adds an early contribution to the signal, but is later completely masked by
the 18 millimeters carbon steel signal.
Here is another interesting situation featuring loose wire mesh that vibrates.
Like galvanized steel, the resulting noise signal is in synch with the pulse, therefore, no amount of
averaging will help. Adding pressure or the shoe could not help here since the mesh was loose within the
concrete. The only possible avenue to mitigate the noise was to increase the liftoff to make the mesh
relatively closer to the component.
Thankfully, this situation is rare and usually localized - Most of the wire mesh should be firmly encased.
The third metallic component that can be found is rebars. They have an even bigger cross-section than
welded wire mesh, but they will not vibrate.
Again, rebars are not a problem if they stand close to the carbon steel. It’s if they are closer to the probe
that they become problematic.
Much like the previous example, the only way to lower interference from a rebar is to add artificial liftoff.
We have emphasized that metallic components interfere more when they are closer to the probe. That is
because the same rebar crosses a greater fraction of the footprint if it is closer to the probe. The signal
coming back from the rebar is also stronger when closer to the probe.
Can you identify in which situation does the rebar interfere the most with the probe? Click on the right
spot.
Indeed, the closer the bar is to the probe, the bigger the impact on the sizing is. Look at how obvious it is
on the corresponding experimental c-scans.
You can observe another interesting feature on these scans. The rebar does not create a single
interference, but 2, here and there [add highlight animation].
That effect is due to the shape of the probe’s magnetic element. When the rebar passes under the u-
shaped yoke, it crosses both exit ports one after the other, each time creating a maximum of disturbance.
That can be used to discriminate rebars from flaws in a component – if you scan with the probe parallel
to the rebar, you will not get two humps.
Finally, heat tracers alongside pipes can be a source of interference. Their sole presence is not a problem
as they are close to the carbon steel and that they are often non ferromagnetic.
But if they are active, electrical tracers may interfere if the current is high and the frequency is different
from the line frequency. They also locally change the component’s temperature, and we’ll see before the
end of this lesson that temperature has an impact on sizing.
As you have seen, not all components interfere with inspected samples the same way.
Thin weather jackets and fine chicken wire have a fast decay rate and will only change the beginning of
the curve without affecting the sizing of defects if the sample is thick enough.
However, more massive interfering components, like rebars and repads, will have a decay rate closer to
the sample’s decay rate, crating interference.
When in the presence of interfering components bigger than the sample, like most pipe flanges, their
signal completely masks the sample’s signal.
Lift off variation effect
The nominal liftoff can vary significantly due to many factors. Old insulation is often compressed by gravity
on the upper side, which leads to sagging. Weather jackets can be damaged or deformed near elbows and
intersections. Marine growth is another common situation where the liftoff might change greatly on the
same component.
PEC Autoset adjusts the amplification level to 70 % of the full-scale for optimal tolerance to liftoff
variations. Some room is left for the signal to increase or decrease without changing the sizing result.
Nonetheless, when the liftoff variation is too large, the decay curve gets out of the A-scan window defined
during the calibration.
Significant liftoff reduction may lead to A-scan saturation, and high liftoff increase may reduce signal
amplitude below the noise level. In both cases, Lyft provides live warnings to the inspector.
Actions must be taken when dealing with saturated and low signals.
Saturation is worse than low signal because it is a threshold situation. As soon as the signal starts to be
saturated, it becomes useless. The algorithm will not converge and no sizing is possible. The best option
is to create a new scan zone and calibrate on a low liftoff and high wall thickness section. Avoiding
saturation during the scan is the main reason why you should perform a survey of the sample prior to
performing the final calibration.
Liftoff increase is more forgiving. The consequence is added noise, so the data will become gradually
noisier. Weak signal warnings and inability to fit occurs only in extreme situations. If it ever happens to
you, create a new scan zone and calibrate on high liftoff. Increasing the averaging will help to compensate
for the noise increase too.
Speed limitations
The inspection with pulsed eddy currents has a maximum speed of operation that depends on two things:
the magnetic fields dynamics and the system setup before inspection. Going faster than the limit imposed
by those factors will lead to signal overspeed and system overspeed respectively.
The signal overspeed occurs when the probe moves physically too fast during the reception phase.
Without going in too much details, the interactions between the varying magnetic field and the probe will
be altered because of the speed of the probe, giving results with unstable or unusual curve endings like
the three examples here. Because the curve’s shape is distorted, the sizing becomes unreliable and the C-
scan will be erratic, like this one. When there’s signal overspeeding, the system will display a “signal
distortion” warning.
Although signal overspeed will most likely occur in dynamic mode, it is possible for it to happen also in
grid mode if, for instance, the probe moves while inspecting a very slow component.
System overspeed, on the other hand, occurs exclusively in dynamic mode when the system has not
completed a measurement cycle for a given point and the probe is in position for the adjacent point. It
depends on the pulse repetition frequency, the grid resolution and the averaging. System overspeed leads
to a reduction in averaging and eventually in missing data points. In such cases the system will display an
“overspeed” warning and the red LED on the probe will flash. System overspeed does not systematically
affect the sizing. If the noise is low, having a lower averaging might not change the data quality
significantly.
Here is an illustration of system overspeeding. In this example, the maximum speed is not yet limited by
the physics but rather by the grid resolution, pulse rate and number of averaging.
Let’s consider five data points acquired by rolling the small probe over a certain distance. Each blue box
represents a pulse. Since the averaging is 2, 2 pulses are triggered each time the probe enters a new
region.
When the scan speed is slow, both acquisitions are over well before the probe makes its way to the next
region. When the speed increases, the length covered by a pulse increase.
When the probe is rolled slightly over the system speed limit, the probe is continuously triggering shots
and sometimes, like for points 3 and 5, the averaging is only 1. Finally, when the speed is very fast, data
points are missing, like number 3 in this example.
The maximum inspection speed is influenced by the pulse repetition frequency, or the PRF, the averaging
and the grid resolution. The speed is also limited by the physics of magnetic fields. Click on the markers
to learn more about each variable.
The pulse repetition frequency is the number of pulses per second the probe can produce. It mostly
depends on the metal properties. As you now know, a single pulse takes more time on a thick component
than on a thin one. A system with advanced electronics like Lyft has generally a slightly higher PRF too.
The averaging is the number of pulses that are blended together to create a single point, or A-scan. Lyft
typically uses an averaging of 2, although it can increase in noisy environments. The more noise you have,
the slower your inspection will be.
The grid resolution is the spacing between acquisition points in your scan. A higher spatial resolution will
yield to a slower inspection speed.
The absolute maximum speed is determined by the physics of magnetic fields and it is estimated from
various system parameters including the type of probe, the system characteristic decay time and the
insulation thickness.
The maximum inspection speed is the minimum value between:
The pulse rate times the grid resolution, divided by the averaging.
The maximum speed set by fields physics
To estimate the maximum scanning speed, the Lyft software uses the same formula:
After the smart pulse is completed, the maximum scanning speed is reported to support the operator in
the selection of the averaging value.
Assuming that you are not limited by fields physics, can you calculate the maximum inspection speed,
knowing that:
After performing PEC Autoset, the pulse rate is 10 Hz
The scan axis resolution is set to 12.7 mm/sample (½ in/sample)
Repeatability Optimization returned an averaging of 4 samples
Other factors
Do you recall which factors are related to the decay rate? Click on the right ones.
Permeability
Conductivity/Resistivity
Wall Thickness
Elasticity
Viscosity
Color
Density
Resistivity
Many material properties change with temperature. Most importantly for us, permeability and
conductivity or resistivity do change with heat. Typically, carbon steel permeability and resistivity both
increase with temperature. That means that eddy currents don’t live as long in a hot pipe than in a cool
one.
For instance, adding heat effectively decreases the decay rate. The graph on the left shows just that. By
adding 100 ° to the temperature of a plate, the sizing dropped by 15 % even is the wall thickness did not
change.
However, if the temperature is stable during an inspection, the effect is negligible on defect detection and
sizing. The maximum component temperature variation during a scan is 20 °C as per ISO Standard. The
graph on the right shows the same data as on the left, but this time the calibration was made at every
temerature point.
One last thing - Since the decay is faster at high temperature, PEC Autoset might not converge on hot and
thin plates.
In rare occasions permeability varies within a component. It can be due to the forging process, great
mechanical stress or magnetization induced by, for instance, MFL or MP testing.
Experienced users can differentiate permeability variations from wall thinning by looking at the decay
curve. Permeability variations feature stronger signal but steeper slope early in time, crossing the
calibration and ending lower, whereas wall thinning is usually a mix of steeper and weaker signal.
However, permeability variations are hard to observe if mixed with liftoff variations. If in doubt, your
options are to demagnetize the part and/or to double check with a thickness gauge.
To mark the end of the content of lesson 3, here are some quick answers to frequently asked questions.
Click on the question to see the answer!
What is the maximum component temperature? It is the Curie Temperature, which is around 700 °C for
carbon steel. Eddyfi upper specification is 500 °C.
What is the impact of wet insulation, ice, water and marine growth? Since they are not conductors, their
effect is negligible.
What is the effect of scale? Scale and corrosion materials result in later signals and they do not interfere
with wall thickness measurements.
What is the effect of a weld? PEC is blind to most welds. Since it is sensitive to metal volume, it will be
impacted by very thick welds, or welds that have a large heat affected zone.
How will two superimposed plates will be measured? Because of the discontinuity created by the
interface, two thin plates do not measure like on thick.
What is the impact of magnetization? Beware of magnetized carbon steel: PEC results are affected by
magnetization, so properly demagnetizing components is recommended if such a risk is present.
Good job!
Before you leave session 3, download the dataset ZIP file in the resources tab.
Take some time to explore the components. They all feature a concept that was covered here.
Happy exploring!
Initial preparation
Hi and welcome to the fourth and last session!
At the end of this lesson, you will have learned
How to get ready for a pulsed eddy current inspection with Lyft
How the system check and the calibration scan zone integrate in the inspection workflow
What to look for during the actual scan
How to conduct a scan zone analysis
The goal of this lesson is to provide a step-by-step guide on performing a pulsed eddy current inspection
job with Lyft. You have already been exposed to the inspection workflow in lesson 2, but the content here
is much more detailed. The inspection workflow is divided in five global steps: Initial preparation, that
should be done prior to arrival on the job site, on-site preparation, calibration, the actual inspection and
finally, the analysis and reporting that can be done afterwards on the instrument or with LyftPro.
All the information contained here is also available in the resources tab. Use it to build your own
procedures!
Before we dive in the details, let’s get an overview of the content of each step. Associate the tasks with
the right workflow step.
The initial preparation covers tasks that can be performed before actually getting on the job site. You
should
Make sure that the scope of work is crystal clear.
Get work permits if necessary;
Structure your inspection and even create the components and scans zones in the Lyft system.
You should also
Choose the right probes to bring along and calculate variables like the minimum detectable defect.
First and foremost, gather all the information required to create components and scan zones in your
project.
Make sure that you have identified all the components that need to be inspected. For instance, elbows,
Ts, and straight sections of a pipeline are all different geometries and should be considered as different
components.
You need to know many characteristics for all the components to be inspected, like the Wall thickness
(WT), the Insulation thickness (CT) and the weather jacket material and thickness (JT). You also need to
know component sizes.
You also need to determine the origin, or datum, of components and know how you will mark the
structure.
Be aware of other structures present in the insulation like rebars and chicken wires that might impact the
scan quality. Go back to session 3 to refresh your memory or for more details about the effects of other
structures on the signal.
Afterwards, you need to know what type of scan is needed for each component to set the scan zones up.
Do you have to inspect the entire component, or only a specific area like the bottom of a pipe? The scan
area size and position (or offset from the component datum) will change accordingly.
Finally, you should already know the scan direction for data acquisition. In grid mode, any direction is
suitable, but in dynamic mode with the encoder wheel, make sure that the selected direction allows good
encoder contact with the surface. For example, avoid scanning along circumferences axis of small pipes.
Here are two examples of component and scan zones creation. On the left is a pipe component with the
origin on the top left.
On the right is a pressure vessel with the origin in front of the viewer, at the bottom of the straight section.
The pipe has been divided in 3 scan zones that cover the bottom half only. In order to do this, scan zone
1 has an offset of 90 ° from the origin and a span of 180 °. Scan zones 2 and 3 have, on top of this, an axial
offset to cover the second and the third of the pipe length.
Regarding the pressure vessel, only its lower half will be scanned. The region has been divided into 2 scan
zones, each covering 180 °. This time, scan zone 1 starts from the origin and scan zone 2 starts from the
opposite side of the origin.
What would be the offset Y of a scan zone covering the top half of the pressure vessel?
0
Height/2 – good answer
Height
Another important step of your initial preparation is to get the work permits. It is important to know that
the Lyft system is not intrinsically safe. Work permits are usually required to use the system in hazardous
environments.
You also have to consider the surface temperature of the inspected components. The standard probe and
cable can each sustain a temperature of up to 70 °C (158 °F). For higher temperatures up to 120 °C (248 °F),
use the probe shoe and high temperature cables. The high temperature cable can resist accidental
contacts on surfaces at up to 260 °C (500 °F).
Next, make sure you pack the probes you need for the job! Follow the probe selection tables and assume
an equivalent increase of 40 mm (1.5 in) of liftoff per 0.5 mm (0.02 in) of galvanized steel.
Finally, Lyft software will suggest a bigger probe when the gain is too high after Autoset. So bring a bigger
probe too if you are close to the boundary between two different probes on the table.
You can refer to the second session of this course, the system overview in the section about how to choose
the right probe, to refresh your memory on this.
The last step of the initial preparation is to calculate all the essential variables that will affect the
inspection.
First the footprint, which will allow you to determine the scan’s resolution and the extent of the edge and
mass effects.
Then, the averaging area, which allows to evaluate when defects are underestimated.
Finally, find the shallowest or smallest detectable defect.
You can refer to session 2 to refresh your memory on this.
Now is time to get a little practice!
Do the exercise simultaneously as we go.
Open Lyft Pro.
You should have downloaded it in session 2.
Create a project named “Initial Preparation”.
Create the first component, named “Horizontal Pipe”, using the displayed information. Use the pipe
geometry. The component does not have insulation nor weather jacket. Use 300 inches or millimeters as
the length.
When you’re done with the component creation, click next.
Now, in the Scan Area tab, create 3 scan zones according to this diagram.
Redo the same process for the second component.
This time, there are only 2 scan zones to create.
On-site preparation
The second step of the inspection workflow is the on-site preparation. This step contains 2 main tasks:
Perform a system’s check and mark the component.
The systems check is performed to:
Validate that the probe and equipment are functioning properly; and to
Comply with standards, like ISO standards.
It is not always mandatory procedure since calibrating the probe, next step in the workflow, is sufficient
to validate that the system is functional.
If you perform systems checks, use the same probe that will be required for inspection on a known sample.
It is optimal if the sample has similar thickness and insulation than the component under inspection, but it can
as well be done on a different sample for practicality. The sample can be made small too, to be easier to carry.
If you don’t have a sample, you cannot perform a system check. You will rely on the calibration to make sure
that the system works.
Finally, the systems check should be performed often. It can be done at the beginning and end of each
inspection or work shift, every four hours or every time the probe is changed.
To do a system check,
1. Create a system check scan zone with a significant name.
2. Create a grid mode setup for the systems check scan zone.
3. Calibrate the system with SmartPULSE™.
If the reference WT is significantly different from component WT:
Perform PEC Autoset, WT Calibration, and Repeatability Optimization separately.
Manually type Mag. Time Constant in Autoset for faster calibration.
4. Perform initial reading—3 to 5 measurements on the same row, and change row for the next systems
check.
If the reference plate Wall Thickness is different from the component Wall Thickness, the displayed
Wall Thickness will be incorrect. However, the relative value will be accurate. To see the correct wall
thickness of the acquired data, you could perform the system check on a dedicated component, or
create a subcomponent covering the scan zone with a different nominal WT.
The last thing to do during the on-site preparation is to mark the component. The idea is to help the
inspectors scan straight, and in accordance with the setup’s resolution.
You can use different techniques to mark the component. You could use Eddyfi’s grid mat, some masking
tape, permanent markers, chalk, etc.
The idea is to indicate the scanning lines, and the rows too if you’re scanning in grid mode.
You can also delay this step and do it after the calibration.
Calibration
The third inspection step is the calibration.
There is nothing like experience with the instrument to master the next steps, but you will at least have
had a good exposure to the process when you get your hands on an instrument.
So, first you need to create a reference scan zone, then perform the initial calibration, then use the survey
mode to find the optimal reference point, and at last, perform a final calibration on the optimal reference
point.
The reference scan zone is used to perform a survey scan and find the best location to perform the final
calibration, to evaluate the inspection conditions and validate if a dynamic scan is possible, and to
maintain a record of the calibration and propagate it to all other scan zones.
In fact, the reference scan zone, like the systems check, is not mandatory. If you don’t want to create a
dedicated reference zone, you can do the calibration steps within the first inspection scan zone of your
component. The calibration will be recorded within the scan zone, but it will not be as explicit as if you
had a reference zone.
Here are a few tips, to make the reference scan zone creation process easier: Use the full component size,
use a standard name, such as RefZone, use the grid scan mode and use the screening, or minimum grid
size.
But before you do the survey, you need to perform an initial calibration. Problem is that at first, you need
to get started somewhere even if you don’t know the best calibration spot. In session 2, We have seen a
few tips to pick a good initial calibration spot in session 2. Can you fill in the blanks? Select the correct
answer
In the survey mode, the C-scan is disabled and the probe works only in grid mode. Look at the a-scan
shape and at the wall thickness info field:
Thicker locations will feature a slower decay curve, so a lower slope. The wall thickness should also be
over 100 %.
Some sections might feature more noise.
Places with less liftoff will show a decay curve that is higher and parallel to the calibration curve. The signal
might even be saturated. In this case, perform SmartPULSE™ again in this area and continue looking for
the optimal reference point.
The optimal reference point is thick, has low liftoff and low noise.
It will not be saturated since you will do the final calibration there. Stop using the survey mode, and
perform the final calibration.
After this, start the acquisition and capture a few, something like 5 to 10 data points at the reference
point. Check the signal quality and repeatability. Having data is necessary to save the scan zone.
Inspection
It is now time to dive in the action and start the actual inspection.
This step covers the inspection scan zone creation, the scan resolution review continuous data validation.
To do this, duplicate the reference scan zone and check the ‘keep calibration’ box. If the scan speed is high
enough and you have an encoder, it’s also the time to change the scan mode to dynamic!
If you did not create a reference scan zone, you do not need to do the duplication, but you will not be
able to change the scan mode.
Then, review the scan resolution. If the scan mode or size parameters were modified, you will be
prompted to verify the grid resolution. But it’s good practice to double check it anyways.
So, tap Scan on the Setup ribbon and make sure that your resolution matches the markings on the
component. Or select an automatic resolution and mark the structure accordingly!
In any case, your grid cannot be spaced by more than one footprint and the marking should match the
resolution in Lyft. This is important to locate the defects and to optimize the algorithms performance like
the compensated wall thickness.
Now the system is fully ready to acquire the scan. Start the acquisition and move the probe in agreement
with the diagram on the scan definition window. Can you match the following diagrams with the proper
scan pattern?

Feedback : Congrats! Did you notice that the probe diagram shows where the cable is coming out from?
That’s important in dynamic mode to orient the encoder properly.
During the inspection, continuously validate data quality. What is good data?
Good data should have a fairly linear decay rate in the exponential portion of the A-scan, in the log-lin
scale. Remember which portion this is?
Good data should also have an initial amplitude between 1 V and 10 V.
Good data may contain low-amplitude and high-frequency noise that does not affect decay rate
evaluation on the signal slope, such as: oscillations or spikes.
If noise is a concern, increase averaging!
Bad data, on the other hand, need to be identified and corrected.
Saturated sections need to be re-scanned with a new calibration, vibration needs to be minimized by using
a probe shoe or by dimming the vibration source, and data should be re-acquired over overspeeding
points.
Learning to recognize good versus bad data quality is very important to ensure that your inspection
provides reliable data. This is why we have incorporated software tools to maximize the efficiency of the
data quality verification process.
Two main tools are available for data quality verification. The best fit curve display and warnings issued
by the software which is constantly monitoring the data quality. Let’s look at each one in more details.
As we saw in section 1.3 to estimate the wall thickness from the A-scan, the software finds the best fitting
curve on the signal from which the relevant parameters can be extracted. That best fit curve can be
displayed. To do so you must select the A-scan by clicking on the graph and select the “Current View” tab.
Then, enable the “Best Fit A-Scan” on the right of the ribbon. This will show the ‘best fit’ curve in blue
along the actual signal in black, and the reference signal in red.
To demonstrate how the best-fit curve can be used for data quality monitoring, let’s compare a good fit
with a bad fit.
On this A-scan, the blue ‘’Best fit’’ curve looks very similar to the black ‘’Actual signal’’ curve. This is a good
‘’Fit’’: The information extracted from the best fit curve is therefore reliable.
On the other A-scan, there is a complete mismatch between the same Actual signal curve and the best fit
curve. This is an extreme example where you could not rely on the wall thickness measurement provided
by the software. Mismatches are usually subtler but that verification can always be made to confirm the
results provided by the software, especially if you want to avoid making false calls.
The software performs basic data quality verifications on each captured data point. When a problem is
found it is displayed in the ‘’Warnings’’ information field.
There are 5 types of warnings: Saturation, weak signal, bad fit, overspeed and signal distortion.
More information on these warnings is available anytime by clicking on the arrow at the bottom right
corner of the “Warnings” information field. The provided information includes the probable causes of the
problem and suggested corrective actions.
Now open LyftPro, go to the frontstage and open the warning information page. Read through all of it and
take good note of any questions you may have about its content.
To re-acquire data in grid mode, simply move the cursor back on the bad point and acquire again. In
dynamic mode, move the probe back and forth.
To attenuate noise, increase averaging.
Re-calibrating might help too because the line filter frequency will be measured again.
Finally, the only way to get rid of saturation is to re-calibrate.
Watch out though: recalibrating will erase previous data. Perform this early or duplicate the scan zone to
avoid losing the whole scan.
Once your scan zones are filled with data, it’s time to jump to the last step: Analysis and report!
The Lyft interface will show 3 types of warnings in the Infofield section. Match the A-scan with the proper
warning Infofield.
Analysis & reporting
The last step of an inspection job is to analyze the scans and to produce the report. We will see how to:
Recalibrate WT using a sub-component, recalibrate WT on existing data, discard bad data that could not
be re-acquired, optimize color palettes, update scan zones, report defects, generate reports, export data
and reports, and take advantage of LyftPro capabilities
Now go in the Ressources tab and find the Analysis & Reporting Project Folder. Open the Pipe folder and
double-click on the Todo.lyfdata file. This should open the LyftPro software with a completed C-scan of a
test pipe. Once you are done, continue this presentation and execute in LyftPro what you just learned
every step of the way. In the end, open the Pipe – Analysed folder and compare your analysis with ours!
When you are ready, click Next.
If the nominal wall thickness is different from the component definition, you can add a sub-component.
It’s a work around because it is impossible to change the wall thickness of a component after its creation,
but it works pretty well.
The Pipe component was defined with the wrong schedule. The pipe has a standard schedule and the wall
thickness is 9.27 mm (0.365 in). Create a full-size sub-component and enter the new nominal wall
thickness.
The first analysis step is to recalibrate on existing data if a thicker area is found, or if you end up knowing
the thickness at a specific location.
In the To Do scan zone, there is an area where the wall thickness is over 104 %. The A-scans are clean, so
you can recalibrate there.
Now is the time to locate suspicious points and discard them. To do so, move the cursor on the bad data.
Tap Discard/Keep. The selected data is grayed out and is no longer considered, but the A-scan remains
visible.
You can tap on discard/keep again on the same coordinates to simply reactivate the data.
On the ToDo C-scan, there are a few bad data points to discard.
Afterwards, optimize the color palette to highlight wall thickness variations.
For the ToDo scan zone, from 70 % to 105 % is a good range. Apply these settings to all the C-scan.
Data is always saved on Lyft, but not the modifications made to the setup such as the ones we just made.
Click on the Update Scan Zone button at this point.
Now it’s time to enter indications. The ToDo scan zone contains three suspicious zones. Add an indication
for each one and use the Compensated Wall Thickness algorithm.
You can also notice thinning on some sections of the pipe. It’s pretty common to observe a wall thickness
variation of 5 % along the circumference of a carbon steel pipe.
You don’t have to enter comments, but its good practice to add a short description.
To report defects, click on the Report tab on the lower edge of the Lyft window. You should have 3
indications in the list.
To generate the report, go to the backstage and click on the Generate Report button. Enter Eddyfi in the
client field and your name as the Analyst. When that’s done, click on finish.
That is it! You have generated an Excel report that contains all the information you need to communicate
to your client. To retrieve it, navigate on your computer to the Pipe folder.
Retrieve also the Excel report in the Pipe – Analyzed folder. Verify that both documents are similar.
The exact location of the indications can change, but the two smaller indications should be measured at
roughly 60 % compensated remaining wall thickness, while the large one should be slightly oversized at
around 50 % compensated remaining wall thickness.
You can also validate this directly in the LyftPro software. If you find differences, try to find why.
Alternatively, keep your dataset and bring it to the hands-on training.
Projects and components can be transferred to computers and other Lyfts:
Via USB
1. Insert USB stick in any instrument port.
2. Export to USB.
3. Import from USB on another instrument or on computer via LyftPro software
Via Wi-Fi
1. Enable Wi-Fi on instrument.
2. Connect instrument and computer on same network.
3. In LyftPro software, Import from instrument to LyftPro and export from LyftPro to instrument.
Besides, you can always take advantage of LyftPro capabilities
Indeed, in LyftPro you have additional features, like:
Calibration propagation between scan zones in the same component
Right-click options in C-scan
Compensated wall thickness C-scan
Also, keep in mind that buttons can help you perform faster inspections. Indeed, all shortcuts are listed
on the instrument.
Good Job!
Great Job completing session 4!
The online course is completed, let’s test your knowledge with the exam!
PECA Introduction
Since the release of Lyft version 2.0, Eddyfi offers a PEC array probe designed for Corrosion Under
Insulation (C.U.I) and Corrosion under fireproofing applications (C.U.F). For simplicity, we’ll refer to it as
the PECA probe.
It features 6 PEC channels placed side-by-side with 3", or 75mm spacing.
It retains all of the advantages known to PEC while covering [2] 18", or 457 mm in a single pass. That
makes it ideal for the fast and efficient inspection of insulated piping systems and vessels.
The PECA probe is adjustable and lockable in shape for various component diameters. It can be locked in
a flat, or almost flat shape for components such as vessels.
For pipe inspection, it can also be adjusted to any radiuses down to 3” or 75mm, including the insulation
and jacket.
The PECA probe comes complete with a comprehensive handling system that is key to an efficient and
tireless operation. It includes a quick release strap system to wrap around pipes, wheeled buggies to
support and handle the straps when the pipe diameter is too large, and modular handles that can be
detached and reattached at will anywhere along the probe, or on any of the buggies as necessary.
When inspecting with single element PEC probes, proper mapping of parts requires marking, or gridding
of the inspected part. Especially true when inspecting in grid mode; this marking process can be a fairly
long and tedious one.
With PECA probes, a lot of time used for marking the part can be saved. A simple yet effective accessory
named ‘’Grid as U go’’ lets you draw reference lines for your scans as you actually go. It simply consists of
a clip on marker holder…
Even tough the PECA probe creates time saving opportunities on many components, it is not
recommended for areas which are too small. The most obvious case would be an area which would be
too small for the probe to fit in…

It is also not recommended for complex geometries such as elbows which aren’t available in the list of
component geometries that can be defined.
Given the relatively large probe size, some limited acces areas, or areas filled with obstructions will be
difficult or impossible to tackle.

The medium PECA can’t apply to [5] outer surfaces with radiuses less than 3 inches, or 75mm. The main
reasons being related with the probe’s minimum bending radius and the fact that elements cannot be
lifted off the surface while inspecting.

Finally, it is not recommended to use the medium PECA probe when [6] lift off is less than 1’’ or 25mm if
you are looking to detect small flaws. In such a case, the coverage is not total along the probe width. Note
that this should not be a problem if you are looking to detect generalized corrosion.
Great! You finish the session... let's continue!
PECA Specs and features
In this section we’ll run a quick review of the features and specifications which are unique to the PECA
probe.
Knowing the PECA specifications can be useful in many situations but don’t worry: You don’t really need
to know all that because it’s already well documented. Whenever you need, you can always consult the
Lyft page which is filled with good information. That page has links to many useful ressources such as the
catalog, the specification sheet and the probe selection table. Don’t hesitate to click on the images above
to reach for the related webpages and save them as reference bookmarks for future reference.
Like the single element probes, it uses the 27 pin fisher connector, remote control and status leds.
The PECA probe has a unique set of features that are key to the exploitation of its full potential.
Like we already said, the PECA probes It features 6 PEC channels placed side-by-side with 3 inch, or 75mm
spacing.
It retains all of the advantages known to PEC while covering18 inch, or 457mm in a single pass. That makes
it ideal for the fast and efficient inspection of insulated piping systems and vessels.
Obviously, it is use perfectly with the Lyft.
The riding surface is equipped with wheels that can be removed to make it lower profile and better deal
with areas with limited access. The encoder can also be retracted and released to better adapt to the scan
mode. In gris mode for instance, having the encoder retracted will help slightly…
Handles too can be adjusted to ensure a comfortable and tireless inspection process. Whenever needed,
removable handles can be attached at any wished position along the probe or on the wheeled buggies if
necessary.
To inspect lower sides of pipes with ease, the strap system can be used
In this video, you will see the PECA probe being installed on an insulated pipe using the strap system and
boggies.
Simply choose the default 4’, or 122cm long straps, snap the free ends to the probe then click in the quick
release buckles. Mount the buggies then tighten up the straps. If necessary, use the quick snap strap
extensions and more buggies to wrap around larger objects.
And finally, key to ensure coverage of the inspected surface in the simplest and yet most efficient way....
Grid as you go lets you snap a marker to the probe handles.
Simply mount the market to the holder then attach to the trailing edge of the handle.
When indexing you can remove the holder to install it on the other side when ready to scan backwards.
In most cases you will mark on coil 6 then index to align the drawn line to the encoder unit.
Great! You finish the session 5.1 !!! Now, let's go with the session 5.2.
PECA Performance and limitation
In this section about the PECA probe performance and limitations; you’ll learn how to set your
expectations about what can be achieved and what cannot be with it.
What you see here is a comparative time-lapse video of the full inspection of C.U.I. on a 8 inches nominal
pipe size (N.P.S) pipe with 2 inches, or 50mm of insulation and a 0.5mm thick aluminum weather jacket.
At the top you see the PEC in grid mode process. It requires some time to grid and scan. In the middle is
PEC in dynamic mode which saves you a lot of time compared to the grid mode by cutting on gridding and
scanning time. Then at the bottom is a dynamic scan with the PECA medium probe. With it, part marking
time is negligible and the scan time is dramatically improved over the others. The sole purpose of the
PECA probe is to bring PEC inspections of large insulated surfaces to high productivity levels. To learn how
much better it can get, you can read our blog about C.U.I. inspection productivity by following this link:
We never know but this might be quite helpful for you at one point in your job!
Just like it is for the single element probes: The PECA probe detection and sizing performance is directly
linked with the footprint. The PECA footprint at zero lift-off is slightly smaller than that of the single
element medium probe, which means its footprint is also slightly smaller. It therefore performs slightly
better in that department. In practical terms though, the difference is hardly perceptible. So for simplicity,
we’ll just state that the PECA medium probe detection and sizing performance is equivalent to that of the
medium single element PEC probe…
In this world nothing is perfect! Like the old saying goes: With great performance comes… Just a couple
of limitations.
Remember what we saw in the section Introducing the PECA probe and complete each limitations (to do
that, move the pieces of puzzle of right) ...
As covered in the section introducing the PECA probe, we clearly identified what the PECA probe cannot
apply to. Most of it is related with the probe size and geometry… You can find all of the necessary
information about that in the previous section. Let’s now talk about limitations that applies to the scans
you’ll actually perform…
The first such limitation to understand is related with the fixed transversal resolution of the probe. As you
may remember from the section introducing the PECA probe, when the probe is flat, the distance between
the channels is 3", or 75mm. The flat probe intrinsic resolution is therefore fixed to that value; that is 3",
or 75mm between data samples across the transversal axis. Also note that the channels centers are
aligned with the probe wheels.
That said, it is important to know that, despite not being able to increase the transversal resolution, the
probe still garantees full coverage within its operating range. In other words, along the transversal axis,
you cannot get a high resolution scan with the PECA probe, but if there is detectable corrosion: It will be
detected no matter where it is along the width of the PECA probe!
So far we talked about the transversal resolution when the probe is flat. But what happens with the
transversal resolution when we bend the probe around a pipe? The transversal resultion actually
increases.
For instance, when the probe is wrapped almost halfway around a pipe, which is the case with a
component for which the inspected surface outside diameter is 12 inches, or 300mm, then the transversal
resolution is 2.4 inches, or 60mm.
Then what happens with the extreme case where the inspected surface is curved enough to let the probe
almost wraps completely around it? That condition is met on components for which the outer diameter
is 5.5 inches, or 140mm. In that case, the transversal resolution is 1.94 inches, or 49mm.
So in short: don’t worry if you see calculated transversal resolutions smaller than 3 inches, or 75mm, when
you define components with thighter overall external diameters. It is perfectly normal given the geometric
properties of the PECA probe.
Some of the limitations are mainly related with either the current state of software, or sizing algorithm
development. An example of such limitations is the fixed indexing. By default, indexing will go the full
length of the probe. That means that, after indexing, the encoder will be at the position channel 6 was
previously located.
Manual indexing can be used to index to non default index values. It can only be done with units of intrinsic
probe resolution such as one or any other amount of that intrinsic resolution. It is currently not possible
to index with fractions of the probe’s intrinsic resolution like shown here. In other words, it is not currently
possible to increase the transversal resolution through indexing strategies…
As you may also have noticed earlier by looking at the PECA probe selection table: We don’t recommend
using it when the lift off is less than 1 inch, or 25mm measured from the belly of the probe. The main
reason for that recommendation is that at that lift off level we lose the full coverage condition necessary
to garantee the detection of the smallest detectable defects. It will not be an issue though, to screen for
generalized corrosion covering larger areas…
Another software limitation to consider when preparing scans, is that in the C-scan, channel 1.... will
always stay in the scan zone.
Channel one is the one on the same side as the cable exit. So any time the probe is either manually
indexed, or automatically indexed, in the C-scan channel 1 will always remain in the scan zone. No matter
what you try, the C-scan will never represent the probe with channel one outside of a scan zone.
The PECA probe is not just 6 single-element probes stitched together. It is a whole magnetic circuit in
which channels and sizing algorithms are all interdependant. For that reason, one cannot use a PECA
probe with lifted sensors. So anytime you scan with some lifted sensors, or with sensors hanging outside
of a part, the results will not be reliable…
For everything else, consider PECA probes to be pretty much the same as the single element probes…
Good job ! You finish the session 5.2 !!!
Let's continue with the session 5.3.
Organizing PECA Scans
Hi! and welcome to this other session about the PECA probe.
During this session, we will see how to get prepared for efficient PEC inspection using the Lyft with PECA
probes. So, let’s begin this session !
First let’s consider a couple of basic recommendations that will apply to most cases you’ll be facing in the
field. The first one is how to deal with obstructions. In most environments you’ll have to deal with
obstructions like pipe supports, pipe connections, thight spaces between structures, ladders, hand rails
and many others. Even roughly installed buckles can hurt the smoothness of your c-scan.
To minimize the time lost in avoiding obstructions and minimize dead zones, consider planning for scans
in which you will have the maximum amount of complete strokes without needing to avoid these
obstructions. This can be done in part by aligning the obstructions with the scan zone edges. Another
strategy to consider, is use proper planning of scan zones sizes and placement that may, if necessary, use
mixed PECA and single element PEC probes. However, note that we cannot mix array and conventional
probes in the same scan zone.
In doing so, stay aware that there is a slightly larger dead zone on the cable side of the PECA probe.
Finally, when dealing with limited access cases where the probe would be too high to fit, you can always
consider removing the wheels to gain better access, or use a smaller probe…
Jerky scans can cause unwanted accelerations and overspeed. If you remember well from previous
sections, this can, in turn, be detrimental to the data quality. Most buckles will not affect the scan
smoothness. But in cases where buckles are chunkier than usual, we recommend, whenever it’s possible,
to align these between the probe wheels. It will result in a smoother, less jerky scan and may generate
better data quality.
The PECA probe is not limited to a scan orientation in particular. When planning for the scan orientation;
we just recommend thinking in terms of optimizing scan efficiency, and minimizing operator fatigue. On
pipes for instance: Scanning along the axial axis will, in most cases, be more efficient because you will get
full coverage with only a few long and uninterrupted strokes. Scanning pipes axially will also enable the
use of the strap system which can dramatically reduce fatigue. This is especially true for the scan lines
that are done on the lower end of larger pipes.
Just like single element probes, the inspection conditions will drive what scan mode will be chosen. In
general, when the dynamic scan mode is available, it will be the top choice. However, the grid mode may
become a necessity if, for instance: The inspected component is too thick, or the required axial resolution
is too high…
The PECA probe covers more surface in a stroke and has 6 times more interaction with the component
than the single element probes. That is why it will be more sensitive to some features and may require
you to switch to the dynamic more often. Examples of such features include:
An overwhelming amount of surface obstructions, such as buckles, damaged weather jackets, connected
pipes and nozzles.
Scanning over corrugated weather jackets. This will not be a problem when scanning along the corrugation
axis but when it is required to scan across, unless you can use a mat that is large enough to even out the
surface, the scan motion will just be impossible to handle.
And finally, you may have to switch to the grid mode if there is too much PEC induced vibrations. In the
presence of ferromagnetic weather jackets, loose wires or chicken wire: It may be more difficult to control
the PEC induced vibration noise with the PECA probe than it is with the single element probes.
So, let’s do a little quiz to verify your comprehension. After that, we will continue with the application of
the CWT.
Jerky scans can cause unwanted accelerations of the probe, leading to A-Scan distortion and overspeed.
Check the correct recommendations that should be followed to improve the quality of inspections with
the PECA probe.
Complete the sentence.

The PECA probe is not limited to a scan orientation in particular.

When planning for the scan orientation; we just recommend thinking in terms of optimizing scan
efficiency, and minimizing operator fatigue.

On pipes: scanning along the pipe ___________ is strongly recommended. This is the most efficient scan
orientation because you will get full pipe coverage with only a few long and uninterrupted passes.

In addition, it also provides more accurate wall thickness sizing: on pipes the sizing algorithms assume
that the PECA probe is bent around the pipe.
When planning for a scan from which you wish to use the CWT later on, you should know that the same
rules apply, except for the index resolution which is fixed to the probe’s intrinsic resolution. In fact, given
that the PECA probe has a fixed transversal resolution, there are cases where the index resolution will not
meet the rule applied to the single element PEC probes. That is not a problem because the PECA probe is
different, so it deserves different rules. Here, as long as the axial resolution is equal, or better [than half
a footprint, you will be ok to apply the CWT.
Before we look at the details of how to define the scan orientations with the PECA probe, let’s look at
basic facts that should always be kept in mind in doing so.
We’ve already said that, based on a current software limitation, channel 1 always has to stay in the scan
zone. This is mainly due to the fact that it was chosen to define the probe position during acquisition. This
will have a significant impact on the definition of the scan orientation as we’ll see later on.
Also: The first scan line direction is fixed. Among other details we’ll review later on, that means you will
not always be able to define the scan orientation independently from where you’d like to place the cable.
And finally: When dealing with gaping weather jacket overlaps, like it’s the case in this example: consider
indexing towards the jacket drop. If you try indexing ‘’Upstairs’’ like it’s shown here: It may be pretty
difficult, especially when using the strap system, which will make it more difficult as you’ll need to release
the system before you can jump up the gap.
The PECA probe being constructed from many channels, the indexing scheme is quite different than that
of the single element probes.
In general, when pressing the index button, the position cursor will jump 6 channel lenghts ahead. In this
example, and you should remember that channel 1 is on the cable exit side, because channel 6 is ahead,
it will be allowed to go out of the scan zone.
This general behaviour wont apply everytime. If channel 1 is ahead for instance, and the scan zone
boudary is within 6 channels lengths from channel 1, the indexing will automatically refrain channel 1
from exiting the scan zone.
Note that in this case, indexing with channel 6 ahead is more Grid as U Go friendly than the case where
channel 1 is ahead. Think about this especially when scanning pipe.
In some cases, manual indexing may be necessary. It would be the case if you have to avoid pushing a
channel out of the component. If you need to avoid an obstacle. Or simply, if you need to get back to a
previous scan line to overwrite bad data. To perform manual indexingin in dynamic mode, you will first
have to pause the encoder and move channel 1 onscreen, then resume encoder. In grid mode. You will
only have to move channel one’s position onscreen, then keep on getting data points...
In light of the information provided in earlier pages, let’s review the available scan orientations with the
PECA probe and what we can recommend to maximize your inspection, especially when you want to make
optimal use of the grid as u go.
The choices of scan orientations are based on the same principle as the single element probes, with the
exceptions inherent to PECA probes. You can choose the scan axis and index axis directions here. The
cable exit is shown on the PECA probe pictogram here. It is very important to consider that, because of
the limitations related with encoder direction, discussed earlier, the cable orientation, or channel one’s
side, will depend on the chosen scan direction. This will in turn influence your choices of scan orientation
and direction if, for instance, you want to maximize the inspection efficiency or the full circumference of
a pipe using the grid as u go.
For any case, any orientation and direction is available but this will drive where the cable exit, or channel
one’s position will be. Because of that, some combinations will be better for piping like this one which is
the default combination when working on pipes. The other combination we can recommend for piping
inspection is this one.
With these combinations, you can wrap around pipes without having to worry about ever putting channel
1 out of a scan zone, which is limited to the 360 degrees line in pipes. That also means you will always end
up with easier last scans. Even if the last scan corresponds to an incomplete probe length, like it’s the case
here, you will just have to set grid as u go on channel 6 then index all the way to the probe’s zero position,
where the control module is.
For the plate geometry the reality is slightly different. The default orientation and direction combination
when the plate geometry is selected is this one. This one is also recommendable for such geometries.
We recommend using these combinations for plate geometries by arranging most scan zones lengths to
a full probe length multiple like in this example. You would only have to grid as u go on the control module,
then index to align channel 6 to the reference line.
Then, even if the final scan zone does not end with a complete probe length stroke, the indexing will
automatically keep channel one in the scan zone, not even requiring to use the grid as u go for that scan
line.
Ready for a quiz ?
Based on a current software limitation, channel 3 always has to stay in the scan zone.
The first scan line direction is fixed.

In other words: you can not always define the scan orientation independently from where you’d like to
place the PECA probe cable.
Complete the sentence.

In general, when pressing the index button, the position cursor will…..
If channel 1 is ahead and the scan zone boundary is within 6 channels lengths from channel 1, the indexing
will automatically refrain channel 1 from exiting the scan zone.
To perform manual indexing in dynamic mode, you will first have to pause the encoder and move channel
3 on screen.
Where can you choose the scan axis and index axis on this page ? Click at the right place.
The cable orientation, or channel one’s side, will depend on the chosen scan direction.
Great ! Let's continue with the session 5.4 !
System verification check
Each PECA probe comes with its own official Eddify galvanized steel verification plate for verification
check. This galvanized steel verification plate comes included with the purchase of the PECA probe.

It is designed to test the functionality of each individual channel of the array. This way, you can be sure
that your PECA probe is in peak condition every time you go out in the field! Or as often as required by
the inspection procedure.
Please, be aware that this plate is not for calibration.

The calibration of the PECA probe must be done on the component you wish to inspect. If the calibration
was to be made on the verification plate, it would results in incorrect and unreliable sizing.
First of all, before you can use the galvanized steel plate to do your verification check, you will have to
prepare the system for data acquisition. The steps are the same as before. You first have to create a
project.

Then, you have to create a component for the galvanised steel plate with a thickness of 2 mm.

Finally, you have to create a scan zone. Width and height of your component and scan zone does not need
to be precise for the verification check to work as long as you can see the few points you will take.
To use the galvanized steel plate to verify the PECA probe, you need to first place the PECA probe on the
plate and perform the SmartPULSE™ following the general recommendations. Then, you need acquire a
few points. These should be made in grid mode without moving the probe. Following your acquisition,
you will then validate your results.

Note that you should leave the check plate in the probe case, with the probe placed on top of it to perform
the tests full circumference.
Be alert of any results that would be out of the norm.
Are all the A-scans for all the channels fairly similar to the averaging curve ?.
Are they similar between themselves ?
Is there any warning signals?
Saturation;
Weak signal;
Bad fit;
Signal distortion.
Is the signal particularly noisy like in this example ?
Are all the pixels in the C-scan uniform?
Keep your eyes open for a change in the colors. For example, a broken channel will produce a gray sample
in the C-scan. Here, the channel two was purposely disconnected to show what could happen. If you look
carefully, you can see that the A-scan of the channel two is also distorted. Note that if the channel three
is the one malfunctioning, it would be impossible to do a SmartPULSE™.
Also, note that some A-scan amplitude variation is acceptable, as well as some variation in the sizing (say
5%) because the probe centering with the plate may vary.
If all the verifications are done and all the signals are of good quality.

You can be confident that your probe is in perfect condition for your measurements. You are good to go
in the field.
Do you need to create a new component everytime
you wish to complete the system verification check ?

Please select the good answer!

Great job completing session 5.4 !

Let's start the session 5.5 !

PECA calibration
In this section, we’ll overview the specifics of calibrating a PECA probe.
For the most part, the recommendations that we previously said applies to single element probes, should
also be applied to PECA probes. Don’t hesitate to review the calibration section of the System overview if
necessary!
Even though there are 6 channels in the PECA probe, its calibration is only done on channel 3.
If you remember well from a previous section in this training: The PECA probe is not just 6 single-element
probes stitched together. It is a whole magnetic circuit, in which channels and sizing algorithms are all
interdependant. You will have to keep that in mind while performing calibration: Calibration will be
affected if any of the channels are over a bad location. That said, you should prioritize channel 3 whenever
compromises are unavoidable…
The result of the calibration is still displayed in red as the nominal A-scan. The twist with the PECA probe
is that even though you’re looking at a random channel in the A-scan, channel 6 in this example… The
displayed nominal Ascan will always be that of channel 3.
We focused on the calibration process so far in this section because it is the most sensitive and critical
part of the Smart Pulse but you should also know that everything we said about calibration also applies
to the whole smart pulse process. Again, our following the provided requirements will lead to ideal results
but in the case where they are impossible to apply, prioritise channel 3 to obtain the best results.
Which channel to prioritize during the calibration ?
Great job completing session 5.5 !

Let's continue with the session 5.6 !

Data Analysis
In this section, we’ll overview the specificities of analyzing data acquired with the PECA probe. More
specifically The A-scan view, The Infofield view, The warnings behavior, Hiding the probe guides during
analysis, The Wall Thickness Calibration on existing data, The CWT minimal resolution, The use of
SubComponents, The Edge smoothing.
In Analysis mode, the A-scan view displays the A-scan corresponding to the data point at the center of the
cursor... Channel 1 in this case. Note that the Best Fit A-scan cannot be displayed for data Acquired with
the PECA probe due to the complex interaction between the channels of the Array.
When analyzing data acquired with the PECA probe, the Infofield View will display positioning and sizing
information related to the data point at the center of the cursor. As with data acquired with a single-
element probe.
During acquisition, all warnings related to any channel of the probe are raised in the Warnings Infofield…
The warnings displayed in Analysis mode … apply to only the data point at the center of the cursor. Here,
a Signal distortion warning is raised on a sample at the center of the cursor on the left picture. A Bad Fit
and a Saturation warnings are raised for the sample at the center of the cursor in the right picture.
The probe guides are a great tool to help positioning the probe in the scan zone before starting the
acquisition… Some might find them unnecessary while analysing data on the Lyft instrument. The probe
guides may be disabled by.. tapping the probe guides button in the Home ribbon or By pressing the
displayed button on the bottom left keypad of the instrument .
Calibration on existing data has a few more restrictions when analysing data acquired with a PECA probe..
The calibration on a single existing point is not allowed To ensure that the calibration is representative of
multiple channels, it must be completed on an existing Area.
The calibration on an existing area must cover at least 3x5 samples… 3 samples in the scan axis…and 5
samples in the index axis… These axis will be inverted in the case of a vertical scan.
If the 3x5 samples minimum size condition is not met, A warning will be displayed and the Calibrate button
will be unavailable.
As for single-element probes, the minimal resolution in the scan axis to allow the use of Compensated
Wall Thickness tool is the probe footprint divided by two…. The resolution in the Index axis.. is fixed by
the probe geometry and does not affect the CWT availability.
SubComponents may be used to define a different Wall Thickness that the Component’s nominal wall
thickness in a region of the scan zone. The tool is available when analysing PECA data.. But only the full
size Size SubComponents may be used. Meaning that the whole scan zone’s nominal wall thickness is
overridden.
When analysing PECA data, the sizing on channels at the extremities of the array may be slightly different
that the sizing at the center. This phenomenon has been purposely exagerated in this example… We will
now show you how it is mitigated in the Lyft Application.
The Lyft application will apply by default edge smoothing correction… Making the c-scan sizing more
uniform.
In some cases, the default edge smoothing correction factor may still leave a non-uniform sizing within
the array. A manual correction may be necessary to obtain the desired edge smooting.
To perform manual edge smoothing factor corrections, press the Edge Smoothing button in the Analysis
Ribbon to access the Edge Smoothing menu. In this case, the default Edge Smoothing factor is 0.70%. The
default factor is calculated from the known component geometry and in this case, it bumps the value
measured by the edge channels up 0.7%. You may return to the default factor by tapping the reset to
default button or remove all edge smoothing correction by tapping the Set to Zero button.
In this example, the Sizing on channels one and six is in average 103.4% with the default Edge Smoothing
factor of 0.70%.
The edge smoothing factor can be seen as a depth offset applied to the edge channels. You could go ahead
and evaluate the correct factor by doing very basic calculations. Our goal is to drive that 103.4% value
down to 100%. Knowing that there is already a +0.7% factor applied, you would just have to subtract 100%
with 103.4% and add 0.7% to get the optimal smoothing factor. In this case it would be -2.7%.
If you prefer: You can set the Edge Smoothing to 0 by clicking the « Set to zero Button » in the Edge
smoothing menu… and tap the Apply button..
The sizing of our data point on channel six is now 102.7% We can manually adjust this sizing to 100.0%
by entering -2.70% in the current factor text box and tapping the apply button… Note that the Edge
Smoothing factor may be positive… or negative.
The sizing on the edges of the array has now been corrected. Note that this process may require a few
trial an errors to apply an Edge Smoothing that will be the best accross the whole C-scan. Once the desired
Edge Smoothing factor is applied…Tap the OK button to close the menu.
In this section of the training, we reviewed the specificities of analysing data acquired with a PECA probe.
So, let's see the answers of the previous quiz...
The key points to remember are…
In analysis mode, the A-scan view and Infofields behave similarly as with single-element PEC data.
Wall Thickness Calibration must be completed on an area of 3x5 points.
The Edge smoothing process makes the sizing more uniform accross the array and can be adjusted
manually.
Finally, the edge smoothing compensatesfor small sizing variations at the edges of the array.
Great job!!!! Almost finish!

Let's continue with the session 5.7 !

PECA Performing the inspection
You know enough about PEC and the PECA probe to consider performing your first PECA practical trial.
This section will give you what you need to make that first experience nice and smooth. We’ll start by
recommending a proper way to install the probe and its accessories. We’ll then cover the details of how
to use Grid as you go to end up covering what you will see displayed on the Lyft screen while acquiring
PECA data.
The first thing to do for a proper probe installation is to set its curvature. This is a critical step as it will
ensure a smooth and consistent scan. Start with all the modules unlocked and free moving then let the
probe sit naturally on a geometrically representative portion of the component.
Ideally, the curvation of the probe should be well repartited between its modules. An easy way to check
that is to ensure that these angle markers are as evenly adjusted as possible between modules. It won’t
always be possible to get it perfectly right, but paying attention will definitely help you get it right before
you lock the probe in shape.
Strapping the probe around pipes can sometimes be a major relief for the inspector. Especially, for
instance, when inspecting the bottom side of long stretches of pipes. The strap system, provided with the
PECA probe, is infinitely adjustable for overall OD’s up to 49 inches, or 125cm.
Please, complete the sentence.

“The first thing to do for a proper probe installation is to set it’s curvature.

This is a critical step as it will ensure

a _________________________ and consistent scan.”
“The strap system, provided with the PECA
probe, is infinitely adjustable for overall OD’s
up to 59 inches, or 150cm.”

Is it true, or false ??
For an efficient installation of the strap system, first consider that female latches come presinstalled on
the probe. With the probe resting on top of the pipe, clip on the strap pre equipped with the male latch.
The other side only has to be clipped on with pressure buttons. Then slide on enough buggies on the strap
and adjust the probe handles to ensure good clearance. If the strap is set to rub on the jacket surface or
catch on features such as buckles, it will wear out quickly…
For the final adjustments, it will be easier if you flip the probe upside down. With the weight of the probe
resting on the straps and buggies, thighten the straps with just enough tension to get the probe to mate
well to the pipe shape. Beware though: Too much tension may result in damaged weather jackets, or jerky
scans. Note that feeding in the loose strap end into the tensionner will help the adjustment process.
Finally, you can install the removable handles anywhere practical: That is either on the buggies or on one
of the probe’s anchor points. As we’ll see later, the handles are also where the grid as you go will be
attached.
If required, additional equipment is available to use with the strap system. To the default male latch
equipped strap, 24 inches, or 61cm extensions can be added. 72 inches, or 183cm extensions can also be
added or combined to cover the larger diameters. Remember that it’s important to let the straps clear
obstacles such as weather jacket straps and buckles. For that, be sure to add enough buggies. A total of 4
buggies are included to do so and more can be added as an option.
Grid as you go requires the use of a non included marker. Here are basic recommendations to what
markers should be used. We don’t have specific marker model or brands to recommend but typical
industrial markers will do. It could actually be the ones you already use as long as it fits with the grid as
you go holder. For a marker to fit is hax to be at the minimum 4.75 inches, or 120mm long. Its outside
diameter has to be between 0.59 inches, or 15mm and 0.748 inches, or 19mm.
Grid as U go has to be positionned relative to the scan direction.
It always to be clipped on the trailing end of the scan direction.
Otherwise it will not cope well with all of the obstacles that are typically found during PEC inspections. It
will also jump, vibrate and clip off without warning.
In details, here’s how you could operate Grid as you go in a typical operating sequence. Let’s first consider
a scan in which you would start with the probe on the upper right corner, scan downwards. Index left then
scan upwards. In that case you would start with the grid as you go installed on the trailing end relative to
the first scan line and on the leading end of the probe relative to the next index direction. In this case,
clipped on the upper side of the control module.
When ready, you would scan down to the indexing point.
Optionnaly, before indexing you can unclip and and reserve the Grid as you go. Then, in the example of a
full probe length Index: You would align the Grid as you go line with module number 6.
Reverse the grid as you go holder to put it on the trailing end of the next scan.
Keep on repeating this process until the scan zone is complete… For partial probe length indexing the
concept is the same except that you will set the grid as you go partway along the probe or align another
module to the line when indexing…
What is displayed during acquisition when using the PECA probe is also particular. To expose that let’s
first look at a typical Lyft screen you may get while doing so. The first notable details is that all the channels
are displayed simultaneously in the A-scan. This is cearly reminded to you with the information displayed
here in the upper right corner of the Ascan view. Note that the channels that goes out of the C-scan aren’t
displayed here.
Another particularity of the display while acquiring with a PECA probe is that all of the position related
information is that of channel 1.
While acquiring, only the minimum thickness among all of the channels is displayed. The related channel
information is provided. It is also worth noting that when running the survey mode, channel 3
measurements alone are displayed.
If you remember from previous sections, the PECA probe is an integral magnetic circuit.If there is a
problem on one channel: It may propagate to the others. For that reason, and also because there is limited
space in the Lyft display screen: There will be a warning displayed if any of the channels are showing signs
of detectable problems. This will be particularly handy for the PECA probe as there is 6 times more
information to look after than there is with single element probes…
During acquisition, useful information is also displayed in the C-scan. The information is quite similar
wether you’re in grid mode or in dynamic mode but there are still a couple of variations so here are the
details. Channel 1, on the cable side, is depicted by a square where the next point will be acquired in grid
mode, and by a cross on the currently acquired point in dynamic mode.
The remaining part of the probe is outlined by the probe guide. It uses dashed contour squares in grid
mode, and crosses centered on channels in dynamic mode.
The most important functional difference between the 2 modes is the arrow that points in the next point
direction in grid mode. That concept does not exist in dynamic mode because the next point direction is
driven by the encoder.
The cursor and probe guide changes slightly when pausing the encoder in dynamic mode. When you need
to move the probe to a new location, whether you want to redo data or work your way around an obstacle
in dynamic mode, you will have to pause the encoder. The cursor ind probe guide will turn like this which
is more like the grid mode version. Then you will just have to move it using this pickup point which is
aligned with channel one on the cable side.
Please, complete the sentence.

“Remember that it’s important to let the straps

clear obstacles such as weather jacket straps and
buckles.

For that, be sure to add ... ? .”

Put in order the efficient installation of the
strap system …………
Please, complete the sentence.
Note that you have two words to write.
“Grid as you go requires the use of a non included marker.
We don’t have specific marker model or brands to recommend but typical __________ markers will do.”
Wow! Good job!

You have completed all the course!

Are you ready for the following ?

Don't forget that you can always come back to see any part of the course!

So, good luck!