Leak, leak, leak, everybody from our industry hates that word and there is a good reason. Usually a leak is associated with loss of containment, spillage of hazardous liquid, uncontrollable airbone contamination, degraged mode of operation, etc.

With a leak of fluids, you can trace back the origin, halt the system and in some cases quickly patch it – if only it was that easy. At least you can physically see it and respond quickly.

But what about those invisible gas leaks? Those that are not sudden but are slowly but surely reducing the internal pressure of a pipe/equipment or a negative pressured room?

Finding such leaks can take hours, days or weeks whilst in the control room your colleagues are seeing the needle on the bar gauge inevitably dropping until reaching that point where the facility is not safe to operate anymore.

Is it uncommon? The definitive answer is no. With degrading materials, especially joints that have to withstand pressure differences over sometime decades, small leaks can appear.

If only there was a simple to use tool, able to detect micro leaks, in a noisy environment and that has already been successfully deployed in a nuclear site …

Wait, actually we might have found one !