In this episode of the Pipeliners Podcast, host Russel Treat speaks with Travis Greenstreet and Ahmed Hassanin about full scale pipeline integrity testing, failure analysis, and the role testing plays in validating integrity management decisions.

The conversation explores burst testing, strain analysis, digital modeling, repair validation, and how operators can use testing and analysis to better understand pipeline behavior, improve confidence in engineering assessments, and support regulatory decision-making.

Full Scope Pipeline Integrity Testing Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms

• Acuren is a North American provider of testing, inspection, certification, and nondestructive testing services focused on supporting industrial asset integrity, safety, and compliance.
• API The American Petroleum Institute, which develops standards and recommended practices for the oil and gas industry.
• Composite Technology Advancement Group (CTAG) Industry collaboration group focused on advancing composite repair technologies and validation methods for pipeline applications.
• Integrity Management Regulatory and engineering processes used to assess, prioritize, and manage pipeline threats and risks.
• Full Scale Testing Testing performed on complete pipeline components or full pipe sections rather than small laboratory coupons or subscale samples.
• Burst Testing A pressure test method where a pipe section is pressurized until failure to evaluate strength, failure behavior, and integrity margins.
• Hydrostatic Testing Pressure testing using liquid to validate pipeline integrity and confirm pressure containment capability.
• Fatigue Testing Repeated pressure cycling used to simulate long-term operational loading and assess crack growth or material degradation.
• Hydrogen Embrittlement Material degradation caused by hydrogen exposure that can reduce ductility and increase cracking susceptibility in steel pipelines.
• Strain Gauges Sensors used to measure localized strain or deformation in pipeline materials during testing.
• Digital Image Correlation (DIC) Optical measurement technique used to visualize and quantify strain fields and deformation patterns across a test specimen.
• Finite Element Analysis (FEA) Numerical modeling method used to simulate stress, strain, and structural behavior under various loading conditions.
• Digital Twin A digital representation of a physical asset or feature used for analysis, simulation, and predictive engineering assessments.
• ASME B31G Industry methodology used to estimate the remaining strength of corroded pipelines.
• RSTRENG Remaining strength assessment methodology commonly used for evaluating metal loss defects in pipelines.
• Circumferential Stress Corrosion Cracking (SCC) Cracking mechanism caused by the combined effects of tensile stress and corrosive environments acting circumferentially around the pipe.
• Composite Repairs Reinforcement systems using engineered composite materials to restore pressure-containing capability without welding steel sleeves onto pipelines.
• PHMSA The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the U.S. federal regulator overseeing pipeline safety.
• Material Characterization Laboratory testing used to determine mechanical and metallurgical properties of pipeline materials.
• Vintage Pipe Older pipeline systems that may have limited material records or historical documentation.

Full Scope Pipeline Integrity Testing Full Episode Transcript

Announcer: Welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast, episode 442, sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, driving safety, environmental protection, and sustainability across the natural gas and oil industry through world-class standards and safety programs.

Since its formation as a standard-setting organization in 1919, API has developed more than 800 standards to enhance industry operations worldwide. Find out more about API at api.org.

The Pipeliners Podcast, where professionals, bubba geeks, and industry insiders share their knowledge and experience about technology, projects, and pipeline operations. And now your host, Russel Treat.

Russel Treat: Thanks for listening to the Pipeliners Podcast. I appreciate you taking the time, and to show that appreciation, we give away a customized Yeti tumbler to one listener every episode.

This week, our winner is Brian Ox with Cambry Compliance. Congratulations, Brian. Your Yeti is on its way. To learn how you can win this signature prize, stick around till the end of the episode.

This week, we speak to Travis Greenstreet and Ahmed Hassanin with Acuren about full scope integrity testing and analysis.

Hey Travis, Ahmed, welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast.

Travis Greenstreet: Hey, it’s good to be here, Russel.

Ahmed Hassanin: Thanks, Russel, for having us.

Russel: So how did you get roped into this deal?

Travis: Well, I did a good amount of testing back when I was in my graduate studies and happened to have a relationship with our former founder, Chris Alexander. He gave me a chance here, and now I’m kind of running things.

Ahmed: Yeah, if you mean how did we get roped into this podcast, I think we get to blame Chris since he’s not around here. He’s been wanting us to kind of go out and talk about ourselves to the industry for a while, so this is a good chance here. This is an opportunity to start.

Russel: Yeah. So just for the listeners, we’re sitting here at the ATV Integrity shop in North Houston. They just wrapped up CTAG, which is the Composite Technology Advancement Group.

Basically, it’s a meeting with some of the best and the brightest in integrity management, looking at what we need to be doing to support new product development and taking new products that are in development and getting them into productive use.

I think that’s a great tee-up for this conversation, because what you guys do is test and analysis. So maybe let’s talk a little bit about what it means to say, “I do pipeline full scale testing.” Let’s start with that question.

Travis: Yeah. So when we say full scale, we mean we’re testing the entire component. In a lot of subscale pipeline testing, when we’re quantifying properties, you’re just taking a tensile coupon or doing something with fracture toughness or Charpy.

Those are typically used in integrity management, but what we do as far as a full scale testing program is we take the entire pipe and all features that we’re interested in and test them in an entire loading case.

The most typical loading case would be a pressurization to burst. We also can do pressure cycling, so we’re trying to simulate fatigue over the lifetime of a pipe. We can do hydrostatic testing. We’ve also done external loading quite a bit. We can do axial tension. We can do bending.

Russel: So Travis, what you’re trying to tell me is you’ve got a job where you get paid to break stuff.

Travis: Yeah. Whenever I’m talking to the masses about it, I do say I tend to blow stuff up.

Russel: Yeah, but you don’t get to use pyrotechnics. You just use pressure.

Travis: No. When I say that, it’s a little bit of a common misconception. I did that in the military. No, it’s a good mix of building cool stuff and then blowing it up, and half the time we mean to blow it up on purpose. So, you know, it’s a good one.

Russel: Yeah. So full scope is looking at all the things you can do and oftentimes testing to failure.

Travis: Yes. Testing to failure is a pretty common thing we do here.

Russel: So how do you do that? What’s the mechanism for doing that? Because some of this pipe, the pressures you’ve got to put to that pipe to burst it, that’s not trivial. How do you do that in a way that it’s safe?

Travis: That is the key part, is the safe. It’s pretty easy to get a pump that can take something to 10K. It’s pretty hard to build a containment chamber that can hold in that amount of energy.

We have a lot of engineering experience here, some really good senior guys who have had a lot of time seeing this kind of testing, and we’ve developed some pretty good procedures around minimizing the energy released from failures.

We also have some pretty sturdy, structurally reinforced boxes. We categorize all of our tests by energy. And so we always try to do everything with liquid. Gas gets a little scary.

Russel: Why is that?

Travis: The compressibility of gas. Gas just can, at the same pressure, hold a lot more energy, so it can spread out a lot more. It’d be a lot harder to contain it once you actually get to the burst.

A gas burst is a lot different than a liquid burst of, say, a 12-inch pipeline. We like to put things in terms of sticks of dynamite because that’s something everyone can kind of visualize.

A liquid burst of, say, a 12-inch pipe would probably be like maybe a twentieth of a stick of dynamite, if even. Whereas a gas burst would probably be a stick and a half. So it’s a pretty scalable difference in the amount of energy that’s released.

Russel: I actually have personal experience with exactly what that looks like.

Travis: Yeah, so you can actually visualize this. Yeah. Our neighbors wouldn’t appreciate it if we were using gas for bursts.

Russel: Yeah. No, I think we’d get a few complaints.

It’s interesting. I would think that just getting to failure, it doesn’t really matter whether you’re using gas or liquid, because the mechanical part, that’s the same. But what happens at failure is probably pretty different for gas versus liquid.

Ahmed: It depends. In most cases, it really doesn’t matter. There are certain cases it does. Hydrogen embrittlement is a big thing right now, and I think that’s what people have been starting to look into with hydrogen testing.

Russel: That sounds dicey.

Ahmed: Yeah. That has a lot of other problems other than just, oh yeah, testing a pipe on water or air that was already embrittled is one thing, but actually testing it on hydrogen. We haven’t gotten into it yet. We’ve definitely had some interest in it, but our tagline I kind of like to throw around is, we can do anything as long as you get enough time, money, and patience.

Testing with hydrogen requires a lot of all of that.

Russel: Okay. I have to dig into this a little bit because that’s intriguing.

Hydrogen is combustible. It’s also a gas. It’s also an extremely small molecule, which if I’m using hydrogen and I’m testing to failure, then what I’ve got to do for containment of that is pretty substantial. Complex.

Ahmed: Oh yeah. Yeah. You don’t want to make a hydrogen bomb, essentially, with something if you go up to those pressures and have a sudden release.

I don’t anticipate ever having the finances to safely back a test here, but somebody’s going to do that somewhere.

Russel: Somebody’s going to do it somewhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the labs in Europe’s not already looking at that.

Ahmed: Yeah. It’s a genuine issue, especially with how much of our infrastructure is steel.

Russel: All right. So what kind of data are you collecting when you test to failure, and how are you collecting it?

Ahmed: We typically do strain. We can also do temperature, especially if it’s an elevated temperature application. We obviously pressure it. Depending on if it’s a combined loading or like a tensile or bend, we can also measure the angles of twist and see if we’re getting any kind of eccentric loading.

But strain is the most common, especially with steel.

Russel: And you use just strain gauges?

Ahmed: Very conventional.

Russel: Okay. It’s been a very long time since I’ve done this, like your grandfather maybe would have done it at the timeframe I did it. A long time ago.

But what I remember about strain gauges is they basically measure strain, but only in a single direction. So if you’re doing a test to failure, I guess one of the things that’s critical is where are you putting the strain gauges and how you’re orienting them.

Ahmed: With all things, it depends on the application. A lot of ours, we’re focused on a very specific feature. So we’ll just have a gauge inside of the feature. If it’s like a crack, we can measure across the crack and measure that.

With steel, the properties are so well understood and a lot of it, you can assume the material properties are going to be relatively consistent throughout the pipe, so the location isn’t as problematic.

If there is a case where you have some weird geometry, strain can be measured through other methods. A common one is the digital image correlation camera, and so that one is basically, you put a bunch of little dots, or I guess you spray paint all over it and put a little speckle pattern. There’s just a fancy camera that can see how the dots move in relation to each other.

That will give you a more global strain map of it. So that’s a little more advanced method of measuring strain than just a strain gauge because you’re right, it’s going to be in one location, in one direction.

Russel: Okay. I’m that kind of nerd. That’s fascinating to me because if I could do that around a corrosion feature and see how that strain propagates around a corrosion feature, I think that’d be fascinating.

Ahmed: Yeah, there’s a lot of work being done on that actually, with corrosion specifically. Certain operators have developed their own burst predictions in corrosion features other than your typical B31G and RSTRENG methods, and a lot of these models are validated with the DIC camera.

So you can get the whole strain field, and you basically get to see what’s happening as the corrosion bulges before it bursts and what’s happening around it. Instead of with a strain gauge, you’re only looking at a very local area.

So yeah, there’s a lot of cool stuff that happens with that. It’s also material independent. It’s a visual thing, right? So you can spray it on composites or non-metallic or anything.

Russel: Right, right. Oh, that’s fascinating. I’d love to see some of that stuff.

I’m curious what you would discover when you do that about how the strain behavior is different than what you would have thought, given what you know, just the base science and what you know about the properties of the metal. How are those things different?

Ahmed: Yeah. I mean, the more truth data you get, the better models you can make, the better predictions you can make. So it just helps your input become better, really.

But that’s not to say that strain gauges aren’t sufficient for the majority of what we do here.

Russel: Yeah. There’s a, okay, I’m trying to frame this as a question, but this is kind of scratching my nerd itch.

Certainly you can get a lot more data if you’re using the camera and you’re picking up how strain is manifesting in a field. To me, that’s just really interesting because I’d want to be able to see it. I want to be able to visualize it and see if it looks like what I would have conceived if I’d never seen it before, right?

That, to me, is just the whole idea. That’s fascinating.

Then the other thing that starts to become interesting about that is, well, how do you mathematically model that? When I was doing my structural engineering in school, this is in the late ’70s, we were just starting to get beyond punch cards on mainframe computers.

I think our mainframe was an Amdahl mainframe. I think it was an eight-bit mainframe. I’d run 2,000 cards into that thing, which is 2,000 lines of code, which is nothing. It’s a lot if you’re carrying around old punch cards on a little red wagon around the college campus. It’s not a lot today given what you would do.

I wrote some numerical methods calculations, and the whole thing was constraining the amount of paper the report came out on and constraining the amount of compute time. Back then compute time was really expensive, and apparently now it’s free.

What you can do mathematically to model that stuff, we’re in a very, very different place.

Ahmed: Yeah. That’s kind of what’s really cool about working here. For me, as someone who started as an analyst, it’s having the lab and the full scale validation. That’s kind of where things tie up.

So let’s say a situation where you have the DIC measuring a corrosion map and looking at the strain field as you’re bursting. I can go and model that using FEA, the same exact corrosion map, and capture that corrosion map with a 3D laser scan and put the exact same geometry in an FE model and give you the exact same strain field that you would capture from the DIC.

Now the client maybe has spent a good amount of money to do this burst test, but now they have an analytical methodology that’s cheaper to move on forward.

Russel: You’re building a digital twin of the feature.

Ahmed: Yeah, exactly. Like you said, with all the cloud modeling and all the computing power we have now, these models are fairly quick compared to the things we could do not very long ago. The things we can do in a matter of a few minutes, we couldn’t have done in a matter of a few years not very long ago.

Russel: Exactly. Which is scary to think. We sent a man to the moon on a four-bit computer.

Anyways, interesting.

All right. Once you’ve done the testing and once you’ve got the data, one of the questions I have is what’s the value of that analysis? If I do something that complex where I’m actually able to model a strain field, what’s the value of that to an operator? How does that help them do a better job of their integrity management? How does that help them reduce their cost of maintenance and repair?

Ahmed: Typical analytical methods have a good amount of conservatism in them, right? Whenever you’re making models or putting equations out to calculate certain things, there’s a good amount of safety factors and conservatism in it, which is good from a regulatory standpoint for operators.

But also sometimes that could mean the operators have to spend a ton of money to do things that maybe they don’t need to do. Like you have to dig something because it’s saying it’s this much pressure to blow up, but in reality, it’s way more conservative than that.

So that’s kind of where the full scale testing comes in, and you tie it into the analysis. You can feel a little bit comfortable about the conservatism, and if you need to reduce it a little bit, the benefit is really high while maintaining the integrity of the pipeline.

So that’s where I think the full scale analysis comes in really good, is that you can validate a lot of these models that you’re using continuously and maybe improve them.

Russel: So if you have some pipe that, if I’m using a conventional method, I’d have to derate to 20 percent until I can get a repair affected, then by using this method, I might be able to derate it to 10 percent with the same level of safety factor and confidence.

Ahmed: Yeah, just because you have better data. Exactly. More data, the more power you’ve got, the better decision I think you’ll make.

A lot of operators are okay spending that money for full scale validation because they know they will get good value out of it.

Russel: Yeah. So let me pivot here a little bit because most of the audience here is pipeline operators, engineers, regulators, and so forth.

How should operators think about what they should be bringing in for full scale testing?

If I’m an integrity engineer working for a pipeline operator, taking something out for testing is not something I think about very often as a mechanism or a smart way to spend the money.

Travis: I mean, I think it’s just really where are they trying to push the bounds of repair and integrity technology?

A lot of our data can be utilized to push against regulatory restrictions because a lot of testing, that’s what we’re talking about today, is with composite repair technology, right?

The more testing we have to validate that a composite repair can repair a girth weld or a wrinkle bend or a crack or circumferential stress corrosion cracking, the more likely these can be updated in an operator’s internal procedures and potentially even get moved into being approved for regulatory use throughout the United States.

With a lot of new repair, a lot of people just want to keep with putting steel on everything. They don’t want glue and string on their pipelines.

Russel: Did you pick that up from Chris Alexander? “I made my living selling glue and string.”

Travis: Oh yeah, I’ve heard it. I hear it daily at this point.

Russel: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Travis: It is a wrap. It is a wrap. When you think about it, it really is just glue and string, though, and it does amazing things.

Russel: Maybe a way to frame this is the regulations generally follow technology by 10 to 20 years, and some of them much longer. It goes all the way back to when the regulation was originally written, and it was written around what technology was available at that time and what our understanding of the base metallurgy was at the time.

Consequently, it dictates certain things that you have to do and timeframes you have to do them in.

But if I, as an operator, can use full scope testing as a mechanism to modify and create my own independent procedures, then I have an engineering basis so I can sit down with a regulator and say, “Well, yeah, I know that regulation says X, but it also says this, and we’re doing this approach because we find this to be more cost effective and we can affect more repairs for the same amount of money that we have available to spend,” that sort of thing.

Ahmed: Yeah. That collaboration between operators and technology vendors and consultants like ourselves, I think that’s really what helps convince operators.

When you have many operators that have the same problem and there’s a lot of solutions that are available, you have to prove it, right? The only way to prove it is by doing your due diligence, especially if you’re going to get permitting and all that from PHMSA and get approval and their stamp of good luck, you have to really prove that stuff.

Analysis alone will give you a good amount, maybe like 80 percent of that, but without full scale testing, I don’t think you’ll really get the full picture.

Russel: It gets you to that 100 percent. Well, there’s a level of confidence that full scale testing creates that you can’t otherwise get to. The math is what the math is, and we think we know what the limits of the math are, but we sometimes don’t.

What the full scope testing will do is validate that the math within these constraints will work.

Ahmed: Yeah. You were asking, how does the operator decide what they want to send? From a business standpoint, I would tell them, send me everything, right? We want to test everything.

But realistically speaking, we’ve got testing and analysis really for, I think we can put it into three things. It’s to validate new technology, validate some assumptions made about integrity decisions, or validate inspection methods.

Typically, most of our testing comes into those buckets.

Russel: Okay. That’s actually good. That’s actually really good.

A big part of what you’re doing is validation, either validating what I believe about the feature and its behavior to be correct, or I’m validating that the inspection method that I’m using is giving me the data I’m looking for, or I’m validating that the repair that I’m affecting is creating the result I’m looking for.

Ahmed: Yeah. A lot of it comes because we don’t know how everything works, right? In the world, these pipes are getting old. They’re getting close to their design life or even exceeded it.

All this vintage pipe has these things that you’re digging up and new problems, like I’m just using hard spots as an example. We’re still learning more about it, and we will be for as long as we’re working with this stuff.

That stuff you have to dig up and you just have to test to generate these models and minimize testing later.

Russel: Yeah. I think what a lot of people who are not engineers don’t understand about engineering, if you recall in your engineering class, when you would go to take an exam, they would give you a problem. They’d say “given” and “required,” and then you solve the problem.

Generally, when we go as engineers in professional practice, what we’re working on is defining the given and understanding that whatever we’re picking as a solution will work given the requirements and the given. But most of it is figuring out the given.

Ahmed: Yeah. So you’re the test giver and the test taker. You have to first give yourself the question, and then like, okay, now I know how to answer it.

Russel: I’ve never heard it put that way. That’s really good. You’re the test maker and the test taker, pretty much.

Ahmed: Yeah.

Russel: No, it’s true. I don’t think I understood that about engineering until I was 25, 30 years into my career. Then I began to realize that there were certain things I knew and I knew well. I knew them very deeply, but they only became valuable when I understood that what I know only works within these constraints.

I learned that in fluid flow dynamics and measurement, right? Because you have these things called equations of state. The equations of state will predict a fluid’s performance, but they only work given a certain set of boundary conditions.

You have to make sure, “Oh, well, that equation of state won’t work for this problem. I need this equation of state for this problem, and here’s why.” Then they overlap, which makes it fun and interesting.

Ahmed: Yeah. It’s like the one thing that was always in engineering school, “Assume friction is zero.” I’ve never dealt with that in any of the testing or analysis we’ve had to do. We always had to know the friction.

Russel: Yeah, that’s interesting. It’s always not zero. Always remember, for sure.

So how did you find yourself getting into this job, and what’s more appealing about working in the lab versus working for an operator for you guys?

Travis: I think the lab is just, I mean, not that operators don’t have crazy things happening to them, but their crazy things are…

I feel like you want a boring day as an operator versus we don’t want boring days here. There’s just always something different. That’s what I enjoy about it.

We’re doing lots of bursts, but there’s always some crazy idea. Some client comes in and I’ve got to design some…

Russel: You’re not doing the same thing over and over again.

Travis: No. Rarely are we doing the same thing. A lot of our test programs are very customized. We specialize in bespoke testing, so we design fixtures for a specific need to find a specific solution.

We’ve got to design fixtures to get our givens, I guess you should say, a lot of the times.

Russel: Right, right. You’ve got to design something that helps you understand what the boundaries of the equation actually are and what solution you’re trying to get to.

I think this is fascinating. I think you’re probably a lot like me, frankly, Travis, because I’m the same thing.

When I got out of the military, I interviewed with Texas Instruments for different facilities. Three of them never gave me a second interview, and one of them really, really wanted me bad.

The difference was the one that wanted me is where they built all the new production lines. Every place else, they had a production line. It was running at 95 percent efficiency, and the job was, don’t screw it up. And if you can get another tenth of a percent, great, but don’t screw it up.

The other one, it was go from zero to 80 and hand it over to the other guys. It just goes to personality. I would have gotten bored silly. I would have had to go break something just because I’d have been bored.

But if everything’s a new problem, a new challenge, then it never gets old. For me. It’s not for everybody, but that’s just for me.

How about you? How did you find yourself on this side of the business versus the operator side?

Ahmed: Yeah. I was very desperate as soon as I graduated college. I was just willing to take whatever job. I was here as an international student, so my first job was consulting for oil and gas for subsea pipelines.

I didn’t really know much about it. I was actually still finishing my master’s, and I was like, man, this is awesome. I’m working on all these crazy, different things. It really feels very tied into our engineering school, you know, not doing just one thing over and over again.

Then, once I moved to ATV and Acuren, I really felt the whole consulting spirit. So I would definitely recommend for any new engineers who are graduating, consulting is a really good place to start.

You learn a lot, and you get to build a network very quickly. You get to talk to operators, regulators, technology companies, and you kind of get a really big field of view of what the industry has to offer. You learn fast, and then you can decide what you want to do.

We see this a lot, a lot of people starting consulting and eventually would go into an operator position or elsewhere. You have amassed so much knowledge. And especially when we have a full scale lab that, for anyone who starts as an analyst, I’m very lucky.

Russel: How many labs like this are there in the U.S.?

Ahmed: I only know of like two or three.

Travis: Yeah, honestly.

Russel: And I’ll bet worldwide it’s not twice that number.

Ahmed: No. It’s very rare where you have people combining all this stuff under one roof and being able to provide a really large suite of services in one place.

A typical example, and these are usually my favorite jobs, is we’ll have a client come in and tell us, “Okay, we need to do material characterization on a pipe.”

So we go to our materials department, who can cut a ring, make tensile specimens, and do the subscale testing.

Then they’re like, “Well, we also need to do a burst on this pipe.” So that’s where I go to Travis. I’m like, “Hey, they’re going to do a burst.”

Then they’re like, “We also want to predict when this is going to fail.” So they come to me.

This becomes the essence of what we do best here, having all that happening.

Russel: Yeah. It’s team-oriented engineering.

Ahmed: Yeah. Then everything kind of ties into each other, and you get to see a big picture. You get all these aha moments from stuff like this.

Russel: Yeah, I get it. I find this stuff fascinating.

I think we’ve got to get Travis to start a new podcast, and we’ll call it “Tore Up by Travis.”

Travis: Yeah. That could go a lot of different directions.

Russel: Travis, for you, this is an audio podcast, so you can’t see Travis. But Travis is rather young, and he looks like he has a fun existence.

Travis: I do get that a lot.

Ahmed: Yeah. He’s a good guy to bring problems to. As me not being fully involved in the full scale testing, I’m always like, “Hey, man, can we bend this thing to failure? Can we break it?”

And he’s like, “Yeah, man, we can. Let’s talk about it.” So it’s always fun to kind of get that.

Russel: Well, the thing about what you do in this full scale testing is it’s not just, can we break it? Because sure, you can certainly break it, but it’s how do we set up the test so that when we break it, we capture the data we need?

That’s the part of it that makes the engineering really interesting.

It’s like the difference in demolition between, “I want to take the bridge down as a military operation,” versus, “I want to take the bridge down as a demolition operation where I minimize the damage when it actually comes down and I minimize the explosives I have to use, and I bring it down in a way that it’s easy and quick to clean up.”

That’s a whole different problem.

Ahmed: Oh yeah. Exactly. There’s just so much value that you can get out from, we say breaking stuff, but really it’s more scientific than that.

There’s a lot that goes into the design, and actually the data acquisition really is the biggest part. It’s like a science experiment at the end of the day. You want to make sure you capture everything you can while you’re running it.

Russel: So what would you guys want to shout out to the pipeline operators, kind of let them know about what y’all do and how to think about putting it in as part of their toolkit for managing integrity?

Travis: I would say just, if you ever have a problem and you feel like there’s a way to test it, I think there’s just a lot of ways in the pipeline industry. There are a lot of different features. There are a lot of different external threats.

I think we are able to effectively model all of those in a laboratory environment. So if there are ever any kind of issues that need to be tested…

A lot of the times we’re just getting pipe someone dug out of the ground and throwing end caps on it and taking it to failure. That’s something that’s very common to do, and you can still learn a lot doing it like that.

Russel: Yeah. Understanding what you actually have in the ground, that’s a big deal because there’s a lot of pipe out there that’s been in the ground 50-plus years and there’s not a lot of records on it.

So the way you do that is you pull a piece out and send it to a place like ATV and measure it, inspect it, break it.

Travis: Yeah. All of the above.

Russel: Exactly.

Well look, thanks guys for taking the time out to visit with me. I thought this was great, and I’ve got to come back here and help you break some stuff. That sounds like a lot of fun.

Travis: Oh yeah. The next time we have a burst, we’ll let you know.

Russel: That’d be good. That’d be good.

All right. Thanks, guys.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of the Pipeliners Podcast and our conversation with Travis and Ahmed.

Just a reminder, you should register to win our customized Pipeliners Podcast Yeti tumbler. All you need to do is visit pipelinepodcastnetwork.com/win and enter yourself in the drawing.

If you have ideas, questions, or topics you’d be interested in, or if you’d like to be a guest, please let me know on the Contact Us page at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com or reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you next week.