【Ten Years of Rapid Development in Chemical Processing Equipment】2896–2025: China’s first AI-based intelligent pipeline inspection model is put into industrial use at Gemstone Pipe Industry

Thread Content

Let’s give praise and support to the achievements made in China’s chemical engineering technology and equipment; your participation in discussions is the greatest encouragement. **********************【Ten Years of Progress in Chemical Engineering Equipment】Regular updates and summaries are available – feel free to join the discussions: https://bbs.hcbbs.com/thread-3576046-1-1.html ***************** The first AI-based intelligent inspection model for steel pipes in China has been put into industrial use at Bao Shi Shun Company in Qinhuangdao. Good news has come from this company: the artificial intelligence system for inspecting steel pipes, developed by them, has been used in various welding pipe production lines under Bao Shi Shun’s ownership. After nearly half a year of operational testing, this AI system is able to use intelligent recognition techniques to analyze real-time X-ray images of steel pipes, achieving a defect detection rate of over 95%. This has helped increase the efficiency of inspection processes by more than 40%, marking the successful industrial application of China’s first AI-based intelligent inspection model for steel pipes. “The image of the weld appears on the screen like a movie, flashing frame by frame; the inspection of a 4-meter steel pipe can be completed in less than 1 minute, and 1,000 inspection images can be reviewed in two minutes, with the locations of suspected defects marked. ”According to Cheng Jibing, a first-level engineer at Gemstone Pipe Industry, compared with the traditional manual inspection methods, AI-powered inspection not only helps inspectors improve efficiency but also keeps the error rate below 5%; such precision and efficiency are at an advanced level in the industry. It is reported that this model features a universal interface design, which enables seamless integration with the inspection equipment on various pipe manufacturing lines within the company. By leveraging the powerful feature-extraction capabilities of **large models, along with expertise in weld inspection, it can quickly identify typical defects in pipes such as cracks, pores, and lack of fusion, ensuring that no defects go unnoticed. Behind this \"sharp eye\" lies 12 months of technical efforts and industry collaboration. This model brought together over 20 technical experts from various member companies under Gem Tube Industry to carry out the collection of million-level industrial image data and the precise annotation of 100,000 core samples. The project team carried out in-depth adaptation based on the **visual large model architecture, optimized parameters through tens of millions of iterations, and established a complete AI engineering pipeline from data collection to model application. As planned, the project team will expand the capabilities of the model by incorporating more diverse data, and will work together with partners such as Huawei Cloud to optimize the algorithms, aiming to raise the accuracy of defect detection in steel pipes to over 98% within 3 years. In the future, as AI-based intelligent inspection models for steel pipes continue to be improved through training, they will help raise the quality of oil and gas pipeline manufacturing in China as well as its capacity to ensure product quality, thereby providing solid technical support for the secure transportation of energy resources in line with the **\"dual carbon\" goals.