SIMAR successfully completes its final validation

During the final testing week, carried out between July 7 and 11 at CHEVRON facilities (Le Havre, France), the final validation phase of SIMAR was successfully completed.

Extensive inspections were carried out using Pulse Eddy Current (PEC), X-ray, and visual methods through the complete SIMAR system. The platform has proven fully effective in deploying and retrieving robots in high-risk areas, eliminating the need for human access. Furthermore, thanks to augmented reality and artificial intelligence, the inspectors' work has been facilitated by providing access to crucial information in real time and streamlining the assessment of asset condition.

Thanks to the joint work of all partners—CATEC, CHEVRON, QUASSET, AUTH, USE, and BASF—a giant step has been achieved in the digitalization and safety of industrial inspection.

SIMAR has faced the following main challenges during the project:

• Reduce the risk and therefore increase the safety of personnel when collecting inspection data.
• Increase the quality of the data by reducing human factors that affect their performance.
• Reduction of current inspection costs and outage time.

Thanks to the technology developed, SIMAR achieved the implementation of a new type of inspection robot consisting of an aerial system with advanced navigation capabilities, which enabled it to land safely on pipelines, even in complex and congested locations, and to deploy lightweight, untethered tracks to perform complete inspections of insulated pipelines.