CorrosionRADAR develops remote sensors for monitoring corrosion in oil and gas pipelines and has secured £250,000 of investment from Mercia Fund Managers and a further £104,000 from Innovate UK through its investment accelerator pilot programme.
The company said it is seeking to address the industry problem of monitoring corrosion in pipelines, particularly in Corrosion Under Insulation (CUI) or buried pipes.
Dr Chiraz Ennaceur, CEO at CorrosionRADAR, said: “Our vision is to support industry moving from reactive to predictive corrosion management using cutting edge technologies from distributed sensing technology to Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) and advanced analytics.”
CorrosionRADAR technology is permanently embedded and pinpoints the location of corrosion at any point along the full length of a pipeline. These capabilities support predictive maintenance programs for the management of industrial assets.
The main aim of the technology is to help companies reduce maintenance costs, while sustaining a high standard of safe and environmentally friendly operations.
The business was established by an international team of four scientists and business professionals, including Dr Prafull Sharma and Prof Hoi Yeung, who developed the original technology.
Dr Brijesh Roy, Investment Manager at Mercia, said: “There is a significant and growing market for CorrosionRADAR to address the key issue of corrosion-related failures for customers that currently have unmet needs and an appetite to adopt new technologies.
"According to the European Corrosion Congress, the oil and gas industry spends around £3.5bn managing corrosion every year, this provides a significant opportunity for CorrosionRADAR to solve this vital gap in the market.”
In 2016, the company won Cranfield University’s VentureFest competition to fund new start-ups and secured a pre-seed investment of £15,000, which has been used to support its product development to date.
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