All in a Day’s Work
Flyability’s Elios makes inspections faster and safer
Anything designed and built on a truly industrial scale— structures like bridges, dams, factories, and refineries—are vital to our everyday lives. These things are expensive to build and equally so to inspect to ensure they are properly maintained. Flyability is a company specializing in confined inspection of large structures like holding tanks and other dangerous abandoned structures.
The company uses a specially designed drone called “Elios” that features a spherical and flexible carbon-fiber cage to protect it while the drone operates in confined areas. It allows the drone to literally bounce off anything it happens to bump into. Equipped with full high-definition and thermal-imaging recording, it also has powerful LEDs to let operators navigate and inspect dark places, and live 2.4GHz video feedback allows for beyond-line-of-sight operations, even in metallic environments.
Flyability notes that a typical drone-based inspection starts with a reconnaissance flight that allows the operators to find all areas that require a closer look. According to its website, “The experience gathered through missions in boilers, storage tanks, ballast tanks, buildings, chimneys, and so on, shows that 10 minutes is sufficient for most infrastructures to perform this reconnaissance flight.” Additional flights more closely inspect defined points of interest with close-up images. Bringing the drone back to the operators after each segment of the inspection allows them to review the images in details and refine/update the inspection plan.
Recently, a refinery infrastructure company was finishing up the assembly of a radiant box, consisting of 144 40-foottall pipes, when quality-control concerns required the visual inspection of this highly complex environment. Scaffolding would only have made the situation worse, so the Elios was pressed into action. For the refinery manufacturer (as with all companies), time is money, so using a drone to inspect and document the structures in question saved a tremendous amount of labor. A two-person crew set up a charging station just outside the building and, using the drone’s onboard lights, flew the drone to the top of each pipe and descended slowly while recording video. The work was completed and high-resolution video records for each pipe were produced in a matter of only a few days, where the inspection would have normally required several weeks. The bottom line: There was an 85 percent savings in time (when compared to manned inspection) and a 75 percent savings in cost. Safety was also greatly improved as no one had to climb high into the structures.