Exova Qatar, part of the global testing, calibration and advisory services group, has invested in Crack Tip Opening Displacement (CTOD) testing capability for Qatari based oil and gas customers.
The new service is designed to extend the capability of the laboratory to provide a quantitative measure of fracture toughness. The new equipment is used to generate fatigue cracks in samples of material from safety critical structures such as pipe lines. These samples are subsequently loaded to obtain a measure of the material’s resistance to the presence of pre-existing defects such as those that may result from the fabrication process or that might develop during service or during transportation.
Anthony Coyle, General Manager of Exova Qatar, said: “This new fatigue pre-cracking unit and the subsequent CTOD testing is highly specialised and is a vital test for the oil and gas sector. By expanding our metallurgical testing capability, we are able to offer our customers not only increased convenience through local access – particularly where testing needs to be witnessed – but also competitive pricing through in-house provision.”
Exova’s capabilities are designed to help to extend asset life, bring predictability to applications, and shorten the time to market for customers’ products, processes and materials. The company operates 115 permanent facilities in 22 countries and employs more than 3,600 people throughout the Middle East, Europe, the Americas and Asia/Asia Pacific.
