Triaxial Sensors & Putting Mums In Danger With Stephen Westwood

Rhett Dotson Welcome to the 2024 edition of Pipeline Things here at PPIM 2024 I am your host, Rhett Dotson. My guest, Christopher de Leon. And you can see we have a new esteemed guest here, Mr. Stephen Westwood, from onstream. Welcome. We know you've been excited about this show. Looking forward to it for weeks yet so much so that if you're watching us on YouTube the audience can see that only one person is out of place in this trio. And it's myself. Christopher de Leon Uncultured is what I say. Rhett Dotson Apparently uncultured, rude. You two can turn against me. It's fine. But on my right, Christopher is in a futbol jersey that looks like he got involved in a paint contest. And Mr. Stephen Westwood is in a different futbol jersey. And I have to admit, I don't know what team it is. Christopher de Leon Also, white and blue. Stephen Westwood Yeah. Yep. white and blue. This is a West Bromwich Albion shirt. A very, very obscure English futbol team that I support. Rhett Dotson Are they close to Wrexham? Stephen Westwood No. Christopher de Leon That’s in Wales. Rhett Dotson So sorry, Uncultured. I don't know anything about where these futbol teams are located. Stephen Westwood They are located in the United Kingdom right. Christopher de Leon And obviously for all of our YouTubers, I am proudly wearing the U.S. women's National jersey. They are champions and so, proudly representing our women's U.S. national team. Rhett Dotson I didn't have a jersey. They said futbol. And I showed up with either a San Francisco 49’s or Kansas City Chiefs shirt. Christopher de Leon He's lying. He actually had a Tay-Tay shirt on. He's one of those. Rhett Dotson It was underneath. Stephen Westwood What’s Tay-Tay shirt? Christopher de Leon Taylor Swift. She's a Kansas City Chiefs. Stephen Westwood Okay. Rhett Dotson She's probably worth more than the club shirt. Christopher de Leon You know. we're going to leave that alone. Let's move on as well. Rhett Dotson Well Steven, thanks for joining us today. So obviously, you're here representing Onstream, super excited. So, what we've been doing at this PPIM arc is we're always covering technology providers going over things with the industry. But before we get there, do you mind giving our audience a little introduction to who is Stephen Westwood? And you're obviously not from these parts. Stephen Westwood Yeah, I'm from East Texas, if that makes sense? Rhett Dotson My wife's from East Texas and you are definitely not from east Texas. Stephen Westwood Okay. Okay. Obviously did a degree and a PhD in at Durham University in the UK was finishing it. Rhett Dotson Is that near Wrexham. Stephen Westwood Nowhere near Wrexham. Do I have to give all of the places relative to Wrexham? Christopher de Leon We have to do geography lessons. Stephen Westwood Okay I was finishing it off, I get a phone call out of the blue. Go ahead. Do you want to come and work for British Gas Online Inspection Center. Three months contract And I went okay, I'll come and do that and then I'll try and find a proper job. Christopher de Leon We've heard this. Not your story. This is common. Stephen Westwood Yeah. So, I thought I'll do it until I find a proper job. And now 30 years later, I moved countries and I'm still in this industry doing this something. Christopher de Leon We need to name this somehow because we just keep hearing this. Rhett Dotson Right. So British Gas became were you part of the are you part of the PI Mafia? Stephen Westwood I was pi for a little while. Okay. So, there’s British Gas PII, GE. I left just before GE. Rhett Dotson I think that qualifies as the PII mafia though. Christopher de Leon Yeah. You were there. Rhett Dotson There's a rich culture that came out of there. A lot of well-known people in the industry. Stephen Westwood Yeah. So, and then transferred over to Canada to work for BJ Services. Rhett Dotson So that's where the accent comes from? Stephen Westwood Yeah. And Canada's a little bit further west of Wrexham. Rhett Dotson Yeah, a few miles west of Wrexham. Thank you. I got my bearings now. Stephen Westwood Okay, good. So worked for BJ Services and then 2016 joined Onstream to try and get them into the large diameter tracks or marketplace. Rhett Dotson So fantastic. So, do you say, ay? Stephen Westwood No, I don't, my son does. Christopher de Leon How do you feel about that? Stephen Westwood It's good. Christopher de Leon Yeah. So, you brought up your son I have to bring this up. So. Henry, right? Stephen Westwood Yeah. Henry. Christopher de Leon Perfect. So, Stephen and I go back a little bit, and so I knew he's an Albion fan. I also know that his mum is a Wolfs. Stephen Westwood No, not my mother was a wolf. yeah, my mum. Henry's mum is a Newcastle fan. Christopher de Leon No, but your mum. Stephen Westwood My mum is a Wolves fan. Christopher de Leon And so, talk to me a little bit about the relationship between Albion fans and Wolves fans. Stephen Westwood Very cordial. Rhett Dotson Is it so cordial that you'd be willing to take your mum into your section of the stadium to sit together? Christopher de Leon I have proof. His risk management strategies that he was willing to take his mom. Rhett Dotson Your brother may or may not have preempted this conversation. Christopher de Leon How would you take your mom to opposing teams home field side knowing that she's a Wolves fan during the Wolves game? Stephen Westwood I wanted to watch the match. Christopher de Leon Is this how you develop ILI tools? Stephen Westwood It’s exactly how I do it, try something risky, see whether it works and then improve. Christopher de Leon Do ask forgiveness later. Stephen Westwood We've all done that. Rhett Dotson You can take it up with your brother after he totally sent all the information over. Stephen Westwood I’m going to kill him. Rhett Dotson And the photograph too. Just as proof. Stephen Westwood Okay? I mean, he's probably got worse photos. Really? Did he send those? Christopher de Leon No, but it's a perfect segue. We're about risk management, right? I mean, that's what we do with ILI tools. So, I felt like that was a great segue. Okay, so this is the guy that builds ILI tools for you. And now that you have an appreciation for the amount of risk, he's willing to take with his mom. We can go from there. Stephen Westwood Okay. Thank you. Yes, but she enjoyed the game. Rhett Dotson So. All right, Moving on past football. Onstream, tell us a little bit about so you mentioned that you came on to help them develop their large diameter stuff. But give us a little bit of the background. Who is Onstream to the audience? Stephen Westwood Onstream started off in Canada, the Calgary area, working in the upstream marketplace. So, three inch to 12 inch predominantly. Rhett Dotson So, when you say upstream, that can have a lot of different meanings to people is upstream from you, from like the wellhead to treatment facilities or what's upstream, what do you mean? Stephen Westwood So probably from the wellhead to a treatment facility all going into a larger, you know, a larger pipeline and going down. Rhett Dotson But mostly small diameter stuff, feeding the larger diameter line. Stephen Westwood Yeah. So, three inch to 12 inch. And then after they develop the MFL tools and the combo tools for that marketplace, they got into the tethered marketplace. BI directional tethering and those tools of that marketplace. That market place is very, very challenging. It's one and a half D bands, low pressure, all the things which make pigging really bad. So, they developed their fast turnaround lots of inspection months ago, but they saw a need to go into the bigger, larger diameter the 16, the 20’s and 36’s. So, 2016 I came on board to develop those tools for them. So now if you go over on our stand there, we have a 30-inch tool and we just built a four inch one and a half D tool which is on the stand as well. So that's quite exciting. That's the first time it's been seen at a show so. Rhett Dotson Wow. So, I was about to ask, it seems like that that that background which you guys build into does there the background from tethered feed in and influence how you all approach the larger diameter stuff because one and a half D that's pretty that's pretty tight. Stephen Westwood One and a half d is fairly tight but in that upstream marketplace it's got to be one and a half d. So yeah, and the tethering side whenever we're designing a big free swim tool, we also look at see whether we can tether it as well to give the options because some of the customers are tethering 20’s, 24’s 36’s or so. Christopher de Leon So, I don't know if we got into this. We talked about, you know, you were studying. What's your role in this? Stephen Westwood I am the technology director, so I'm responsible for the mechanical design group, the electronics design group, the software and the algorithms group. So, a wide range of skills. One day I can be talking about one thing and the next thing I'm talking about neural networks. So, it's a wide range of cool things. Rhett Dotson So, in this, I like to say we're at PPIM 2024 and this year's definitely the biggest that I can remember. You know, we have all the way up to the thousands in terms of booths. It feels like every year we come here. Stephen There's a new MFL or a new ILI provider almost like they're springing up like weeds across the industry. That's not to say you guys are weeds, but the new ones are coming up like weeds, what separates you guys. What's the differentiator truly unique about Onstream? Stephen Westwood I think you hit the nail on the head. Okay. When I started off many years ago in this industry, it was very challenging to build tools. Okay, the batteries were hard to get hold off the electronics all were really hard. Okay? With microprocessors now, with your iPhones and the lithium batteries, that technology for building tools is really easy. Okay, It's relatively easy. Okay. Now, making it reliable, that's another challenge. Okay. I feel as an industry, we're now moving more into what you do with the data that you collect. And that's where the differentiator is going to be in the data, how you how you size, what your performance is going to be like. Christopher de Leon Yeah, we obviously we've had an opportunity to talk to a lot of guests on the show and, you know, we kind of have this position that pigging at the time was focused on the tool. Can you get the tool in and out? And then it was can you get in and out and collect good usable data? Then can you get more than one technology in and out? And I feel like now just paralleling that, it's really gotten to how can we tune these tools to get data. And I'm going to say differently, algorithms to focus on specific threats now. So now we understand you have corrosion that may be this big, but now we're trying to characterize it almost, you know, complex corrosion pits. Is that something that you guys are seeing on your platform then? Stephen Westwood The nice thing about the upstream marketplace, the sort of corrosion you see, it's so wide. Okay, we have a boneyard, where all the pipe we get from the upstream operators go in that, okay. And you just see complex morphologies, pits within pit slab erosion. I've seen four-inch pipe go down to one millimeter wall, all the way channeled in. Okay. So, we get in that data, we are scanning it. We’ll, call it into the MFL signals. We've got a big, big database with over 100,000 features in there. So, we're using that search algorithm development trend analysis to actually this is what this particular feature would look like. Okay. Yeah. So having that access to all that raw MFL data, raw laser data is a really nice thing to have. Christopher de Leon But I imagine there's only so much you can do with data manipulation, right? I mean, there's also a big component on the data that you collect. Stephen Westwood Yes. So yeah, there's the data. So, at the moment, as I said, we're triaxial on all our tools. We got a very tight scan page going down the line. Okay? A and we have a caliper. Ideally all those panels are available for the analysts to make that decision. Christopher de Leon So, I want I want to dig into something a little bit here. I feel like you and I had kind of had a lot of these discussions. Yes. Back it's the BJ days and all the energy transfer. But, you know, honestly, I can't tell you that I feel like now, now in the role that I'm in, that what we knew years ago back in like 2000 989 hasn't really come forward is triaxial just you know jargon Is it important I mean what is it right I mean, we hear terms like, it's MFL. It's a high-resolution engine. You're saying triaxial. Rhett Dotson I want to I want to preface it another way and I ask you so I ask somebody to explain it to me once, okay. And their explanation was, you get nothing from the third sensor. Stephen Westwood Which one's the third sensor? Rhett Dotson I didn't know enough to ask. I was giving you the answer I got. Christopher de Leon So, yeah. And so, give us the why, right? I mean, why does it matter? Stephen Westwood Okay, then. So, when we went out and started this development, I spent a lot of time building finite element models of magnetic flux. Leakage from defects. So, we built financial models of all these corrosion shapes. Got the magnetic responses from that. And then we said, okay, let's build sizing algorithms using the axial component, the radial component, the circumstantial component. Let's use axial radial actually already on set and all the combinations and see which one actually gives us the better performance. Okay. We found that combining all three of them, all the signals from them gave us better performance over just a radial based sizing algorithm or an axis-based sizing outcome. So, we're seeing an actual performance improvement on our tolerances. Okay. Christopher de Leon And you've been doing this just for a little while, right? Stephen Westwood Triaxial stuff? Well, since 2001. Christopher de Leon So, it's not new. What is your perspective on Let's talk for us for the U.S. market. How well educated would you say that, the average US ILI enthusiast, would understand the difference between a single component MFL sensor versus a tri axial component MFL sensor? Stephen Westwood I think there's lots of work to do that. I mean, we're still having this conversation since 2001. So, there's still a lot of work to actually do and inform and educate people on the differences. One of the things I do know is and you talked about more vendors coming into the marketplace, almost every vendor coming in now is coming in with triaxial. Okay, so I think the vendors who have it cost a lot of money to convert fully over to triaxial. But if you're starting from scratch, it seems everybody's going that way. Christopher de Leon Does it matter? To have a triaxial versus having just a single component like a radial only or a horizontal only? Stephen Westwood Okay, I know the sizing performance is better. Once you include all three sets, which include the axial signal, the radial, the SEC, the subcomponent. Yeah. is really, when you look at it, it helps you define the shape of the collision and you overlay everything you look at all in your own business. You're looking at all sources of information to make your judgment. So, yeah. Rhett Dotson So, Stephen, I have to let you know you have I don't think I have seen Christopher be so direct in our podcast. I think the jersey set him off. I don't it's like a different side of him. He is like on this tri axial thing he is like a dog on a ball. We're going to take a few minutes break, re group, gather our thoughts and come back and talk about this whole triaxial thing and where Onstream side in the future. Okay, take a brief break. We'll be right back audience. BJ Lowe Hello, everyone. It's BJ Lowe from Clarion, and we're very happy to be a sponsoring this season of Pipeline things to showcase the impressive technologies being exhibited. Here at PPIM. Ben Stroman I'm Ben Stroman and we've been impressed with the turnout at the 36th PPIM conference event in 2024 with 159 companies exhibiting over 3000 attendees and over 90 papers being presented. We've had a great year with a huge turnout in terms of high-quality technical paper submissions. Attendees this year will have the opportunity to hear from industry stakeholders and their advancements in several fields, including ILI analysis, geo hazards, material identifications and verification, emerging issues, repair, hydrogen integrity, management, entity and more. If you couldn't make it in person to the PPIM conference in February, you can always find helpful resources and tools offered by Clarion year-round. We have several courses taught by subject matter experts that can be found on our website. We're excited for PPIM this year and we hope to see everyone next year as well. But be sure to stay up to date with Clarion and its offerings by joining our mailing list on our Web site. Thanks. Rhett Dotson All right. Welcome back to Pipeline Things where we are continuing our conversation with Mr. Stephen Westwood from Onstream. So, I know you guys got into a great conversation about the tri axial sensors. Christopher de Leon It goes a long way for me, right? So, I mean, obviously, Bruce Nazareth, the SGA conference, I mean, ILI Workshop, long time ago, you know, he put me on to, you know, some previous work that Battelle had done. Are you familiar with the work? Stephen Westwood It was basically 80% of the information's in one component. 90% is in two components. And 95% of all the possible information is in all three components. Christopher de Leon So what you're saying is, if you're dealing with an ILI tool that has only a single component hall effect sensor, then at best you're getting 80% of the data on it. Stephen Westwood In fact, you're getting 80% of the information from the flux leakage signal, and that kind of makes sense. Rhett Dotson So, there is a bit of a law of diminishing returns, but there is something you do get with that. Christopher de Leon And that ties into ultimately what you're trying to achieve, right? So, if it's very complex corrosion if it's because one of the things that I remember that that Bruce would show is you do a lot of pull tests, right? And he would say, here are different configurations of pitting, can you find that? Stephen Westwood Yeah. Yeah. And it's an eye opener actually doing that. You know, when you have a pipeline map of pull test and you go and find those features, go size up feature. It's an eye opener. Yeah. I've strongly recommended. Christopher de Leon I have a question for you. We do this often, but off camera. But we can do it on camera. So, do you interact with the ILI analysts at all? Stephen Westwood So, at Onstream we have a weekly manager meeting where we go over the data validation results from that week. So that's the technology director myself and director and the CEO of the company review the data validation results that's come in that week. And what can we do? What can we learn that gets fed into a lesson learned every month to the actual analysts and to the boneyard? We'll take our analysts down there to actually get their hands on the corrosion, the different morphologies to get an idea of what pipe looks like. Christopher de Leon So, I remember once at a former employer, I remember someone telling me a story that they never had false calls or inaccuracies. And I said, why is that? And he said, because when we do digs, we take the analysts with us. And I was like, That's fantastic. And he's like, Yeah, it's simple. Yeah. If they're right, they go home. If they're wrong, they go into the ditch, is that the boneyard you're talking about? Stephen Westwood No, boneyard is just a collection of pipes that we get from the operators with what they cut out. So, in the upstream marketplace, it's a lot more cutting. And so, you get the samples back. You can take a look at them. Rhett Dotson So actually, that that topic hits really close to home for me. I don't know if you've ever read the book Black Box Thinking, I don't know if you're a reader but Black box thinking I only have so many books, if you like different with that. That guy, what he did is he compared the flight industry, air, you know, airfare with the medical industry and how they did or didn't learn from mistakes differently to improve within the medical industry. One of the things that he brings up to point to this is that radiologists, people that inspect or do the surveys that they feed, the doctors, they make calls, but then they're almost never, ever given feedback on whether or not what they identified was correct. And they did the study where they basically had the radiologists read a scan and then they immediately gave them feedback and they said it was it was a noticeable improvement. And the radiologists called. I've often argued that a lot of times in our industry you have analysts who have analyzed thousands of miles of pipeline and never touched a pipe never seen a real-world corrosion defect actually understood what that signal is, because you guys, I mean, you don't see actual corrosion on the screen. No. You see squiggles and lines. Stephen Westwood So, you've got to close that loop closing that loops in part and the analyst have to see it. Look at the signals and have an idea what that corrosion morphology is like. Is this something that is of concern? And so, getting the analyst to go down, look at pipe, look at the signals and close that loop is vitally important and it's a really key thing. Okay. A simply on the technology side, I always like call the designers the pigs to actually go out and run tools and see what happens actually in the field. Okay, Yeah, because that's another feedback loop we can close. And most of the technology team can actually look in the software, can identify corrosion, knows what the like can run the software and that's really key as well. Rhett Dotson So, if you don't mind me asking you, you typically learn the most from your failures. It's usually when you get the one that's way off, that's really where you learn. So, what's that like when you all get in? It happens to every to every ILI member when you get the one that's like, my gosh, you know, what's that, what’s that process like? How do you run that down, if you don't mind me asking? Stephen Westwood Okay, so I mentioned the data validation. Okay, so that would be the first point of contact. Okay? It would come in; it would be an outlier. Okay. And then we have to work out why is it the tool dynamics? Is the tool Traveling too fast was a debris in the line, all those things. Okay. And then once we eliminate those, you go into things like calibrations, algorithms, issues, anything like that. Okay. And you try and close that loop as quickly as possible. Okay. Because there's nothing worse for a customer to be sitting there with an outlier and a report. You need to close that loop as quickly as possible so the pipeline can still be functionally in operation. I enjoy getting those. Okay, it’s challenging you come starting the process. Rhett Dotson The problem solver likes it. I think, you know, one of the things I want to I want to leave with the audience is give feedback to your vendors. But yes, like too often in our previous slide, the only time the analyst ever got feedback is when it was wrong. But I also think there's value and given the positive feedback too, and I really like to hear that you guys have an in-house meeting. I like that idea of meeting. Christopher de Leon And its so valuable right in so much that I mean, there was even a almost a congressional mandate right here in the States where FEMSA was charged to spin up an information sharing protocol. Right. I mean, that was a couple of years ago where, I mean, it's been pretty clear, right, to kind of motivate pipeline operators to engage with service providers more often. Rhett Dotson So, Stephen, I've really enjoyed this. You know, I want to say thanks. Thanks for joining us as we close, you know, can you tell us a little bit I'd like to be the last couple of minutes the audience What’s the future like for Onstream? Where do you guys how do you want to share anything, you want to share? Stephen Westwood Okay, so sharing wise, there's a four inch, one and a half d tall that we've just developed. Okay. We just finished running a 36-inch speed control tool. Well, down in Mexico, we're looking to expand our fleet, expand our business in the U.S. So, yeah. Christopher de Leon What's the largest tool size you have at the moment? Stephen Westwood 36. Rhett Dotson All right, to our audience pipeline thing. Stephen, thank you for joining us. We appreciate you come back in two weeks as we continue our PPIM 2024 series. Thanks