Speaker’s name: Maarten Adams
Organization: SHM NEXT
Job title: Managing Director
Biography:
Maarten Adams is the Managing Director of SHM Next, a company that develops wireless sensor systems for predictive maintenance of steel infrastructure. He has a background in maritime structures and expertise in non-destructive testing (NDT) systems, with a focus on acoustic emission and ultrasonics.
Presentation title: Wireless Solutions for Predictive Maintenance Challenges
Presentation abstract/summary:
Pressure equipment such as storage tanks, pipelines, and pressure vessels are critical assets in energy and process industries, where failures can cause safety hazards, environmental damage, and costly downtime. Traditional inspection methods are periodic and often limited in detecting early-stage defects under operational conditions.
Acoustic emission (AE) monitoring has long been recognized as a promising technique for detecting active damage processes. AE can provide continuous, real-time integrity assessment by capturing emissions generated by corrosion, fatigue, and other degradation mechanisms. However, broader adoption of the conventional AE systems for pressure equipment has been constrained by several challenges: sensitivity to background noise, difficulties in distinguishing defect-related signals from operational activity, and high signal attenuation in complex or coated structures. Furthermore, reliance on wired sensor networks has restricted scalability and increased deployment costs.
In this presentation, we will provide an overview of the fundamental science of AE for monitoring material degradation and highlight recent advances in wireless sensing and signal processing that are enabling AE’s full potential for practical large-scale integrity assessment of pressure equipment. These developments minimize the reliance on intrusive shutdown-based inspections by enabling continuous monitoring under operating conditions, such as in hazardous areas, at high temperature, or in submerged and underground environments. Examples of such sensor systems developed by SHM NEXT and their applications across various industries will also be highlighted.