​Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP), Neu Dimension Sdn Bhd and Petroclamp Sdn Bhd have entered into an agreement that will benefit the oil and gas industry's future in the areas of corrosion management and asset integrity. 

To mark this occasion, a document exchange ceremony was held at UTP Centre for Advanced and Professional Education (CAPE) in Kuala Lumpur. 

UTP was represented by its Vice Chancellor Professor Dr Mohamed Ibrahim Abdul Mutalib, Neu Dimension Sdn Bhd by its Group President Dato' Aziz Ayob while Petroclamp Sdn Bhd was represented by its Chairman Mohd Azizi Hamzah.

 "We hope through our collaboration with both parties, research and innovation will have a lasting impact and contribute to building a sustainable and dynamic nation.

 UTP not only aspire to be a driving force of research.  We also want to ensure that we are the centre for creating and disseminating new knowledge and become an internationally recognised partner of choice for industry and respected scientific community by the year 2025," said Mohamed Ibrahim.

Under this agreement, Neu Dimension Sdn Bhd and Petroclamp Sdn Bhd is responsible to commercialise the Pipeline Reliability and Integrity Assessment software (PRIA) and Mobile In-Situ Corrosion (MiCorr) respectively to prevent corrosion in the oil and gas pipelines.

Pipelines can experience many forms of damage during their life, ranging from damage introduced at the time of manufacturing and construction, through to in-service damage due to corrosion or external interference.

To establish the short and long term integrity of damaged pipelines, it is important to assess if the damage affects the integrity of the pipeline under the given loading conditions.

The PRIA software, invented by Associate Professor Dr Zahiraniza Mustaffa from UTP Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, applies a reliability approach to evaluate time-variant probability of failure, while utilising data sampling.   It performs a statistical analysis to assess the integrity of the corroded pipeline, and analyse its growth rate based on non-linear models.

Meanwhile, MiCorr is an equipment that identifies potential corrosion problems in systems where no regular long term monitoring is available and provides data to establish corrosion mechanism and corrosion control options.  

It also offers quick real-time measurements for electrochemical properties of corroding surface (LPR corrosion rate) and pH as well as dissolved oxygen (DO) in the actual pipeline.

The equipment is developed by UTP Head of Centre for Corrosion Research Associate Professor Ir Dr Mokhtar Che Ismail.

"Moving forward, UTP will collaborate with both institutions to expand MiCorr's marketability not only in the South East Asia region but globally as well.  As for PRIA, the initiative is to penetrate the market with the existing software which will subsequently be upgraded to having extensive functionalities in assisting the relevant industries," said Mohamed Ibrahim.

Also present at the ceremony were Group Director of Sunsuria Sdn. Bhd Dato' Tan Tian Ming, CEO of Malaysia Vision Valley Datuk Redza Rafiq Abdul Razak and delegates from Neu Dimension Sdn Bhd and Petroclamp Sdn Bhd.