Challenge
A 135-foot wide and 51-foot tall tank had fluid leaking from its base.
Constraints
The tank was imperative to plant operations and could not be taken off-line.
Solution
In order to reduce the impact on production, we set sampling ports under the floor of the tank in a designed array. Flow-through was calculated, and a QTA (Quantifiable Tagging Agent) was injected into the 24 inch inlet pipe upstream of the tank. Sampling was done at 12/24/72 hour intervals, followed by 7 and 10-day intervals.
Result
A leak was detected at the 24-hour mark, with subsequent sampling verifying the initial result. By triangulating the sample port results, the leak location area was determined. Three additional small leaks were found in the suspect area, and one intermittent leak was discovered on the 7 and 10-day data samples.