Dexon TechnologyDexon Technology just built one of the highest-resolution 6-in. UT crack tools in the industry.
Here is how we pulled it off.
Small Diameter, Big Headaches
6-in. pigs might be easy to lift, but designing one to deliver ±1.0 mm crack detection and sizing—while also safely passing 1.5D bends—is no easy task.
Most engineers build high-resolution tools by either making the body longer (which means it cannot navigate tight bends) or adding extra bodies (which reduces reliability).
Our engineers asked: why not neither?
The Solution: Innovative Design
Ultrasonic sensors allow tools to "see" into a pipeline. The more sensors, the sharper the vision.
Designers fit nearly 500 transducers and acquisition electronics into two bodies.
They accomplished this by shrinking electronics, removing cables, and ditching internal complexity—minimizing the total package size.
The resulting tool combined high accuracy with an ability to pass 1.5D bends.
Thanks to the hundreds of transducers bristling along its length, the UT-CD 6-in. earned it a nickname, The Pineapple.
Building With Precision
Designing a condensed tool was just the first step. Next came building it.
Each transducer housing was cut to within 10 microns (less than the thickness of a human hair). Mechanists 5-axis milled every slot, built and installed transducers in-house, and manually verified every part.
Infinity Testing
Before launch, Dexon added a 6-in. infinity loop to our test yard, allowing designers to test the tool’s abilities against tight bends and realistic defects.
Then, we tested the tool. Again. And again. And again.
Whether running the tool for 100 km over 30 hours or passing tight bends dozens of times, we needed to be certain that it would run error-free—in real-world conditions rather than on the bench.
Elite Crack Detection
Cracks do not care how small your pipeline is. Neither should your inspection tool.
Dexon’s UT-CD 6-in. Hawk brings high-resolution crack detection to some of the toughest pipelines in the world.