Monitor Hull Corrosion with Thickness Gauge

After our recent article about inspecting your hull paint to reduce bio-fouling and acting as an anti-corrosion method, we wanted to delve deeper into one of the biggest problems shipowners and operators face: corrosion.

Corrosion is one of the biggest threats to shipping freights and other large vessels. To combat against this, methods like cathodic protection and using sacrificial anodes have been developed by ship owners and operators.

So how does Deep Trekker come help?

Frequent underwater inspections are a way to monitor the state of a ship’s hull without needing to hire expensive dive teams or completely dry-dock the vessel. With our mini-ROVs, ship owners and operators can have eyes in the water and on their hull within minutes. Recording abilities allow them to document the state of the hull at any given time and with the option of hooking up the controller to a larger screen, ship inspections can be viewed by a number of crew members and operators at one time.

But how can the ROV be used to monitor the state of corrosion once it has started? With the thickness gauge option, operators are able to monitor any thinning that has taken place on the materials of their ship’s hull.

In order to maintain the integrity of a ship’s hull, the vessel operators need to constantly check on its status. Whenever an area is compromised and/or begins to rust, it needs to be brought down to the bare metal, primed and painted. Finding areas like this from the get-go helps ensure that repair costs are kept low by not letting the issue progress too far before fixing them.

With the thickness gauge in place, operators can ensure that problem areas are addressed prior to a full repair being necessary. They can monitor the area until it needs to be re-primed and painted, but do not dry dock the vessel before it is necessary either.

The thickness gauge can be integrated to both the DTG2 and DTX2 ROV models. Options for the standard 3.5 MHz probe or 2.5 MHz and 5.0 MHz proves are available depending on the user’s needs. All measurements are also error checked using 3 return echoes to offer repeatable and reliable results.