SABIC UK Focuses in on Site Safety With CorDEX's Next Generation ATEX Digital Camera

MIDDLESBROUGH, England, May 18, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --

Engineers at SABIC UK Petrochemicals Limited have improved equipment monitoring in hazardous areas with the help of the next generation of ATEX explosion proof digital cameras.

CorDEX Instruments' ToughPIX 2303XP has been adopted by SABIC UK's site engineering team at the company's Teesside petrochemicals plant, which has resulted in significant time savings across a number of projects.

SABIC UK is a member of SABIC, one of the world's top 10 petrochemicals companies, which is a major producer of plastics and chemicals and employs more than 33,000 people worldwide.

Asset surveys, maintenance programmes and fire safety measures are key priorities at industrial sites and high quality digital photography enables engineering teams to work more effectively, ensuring that equipment and systems are running efficiently and safely.

Assistant technical engineer Wayne Douthwaite said: "For a site engineering team, a high quality hazardous area camera is an essential tool and the ToughPIX meets our needs perfectly. It does everything we need it to do, in areas where normal digital cameras are not allowed, and its robust construction gives it a much longer life-span than other cameras we have used in the past."

Encased in aluminium with an ultra-bright display protected by armoured glass, the camera is custom designed for use in the harshest environments and can capture still and moving images in AVI format of up to 10 mega pixels. The next-generation device is also ATEX and American CSA certified to take images within Zone 1 IIC T4 and Class 1 Division I B, C, D hazardous areas.

The ToughPIX 2303XP camera has been used by the team on a number of projects including: monitoring process-critical valves, a tank decommissioning project and tank rim seal fire detection work.

Mr Douthwaite said: "Using our photographs we have also been able to show the maintenance team which pipework and associated instrumentation has to be disconnected and removed as part of a tank decommissioning project. Without the camera this would have required a member of our team to point out or mark the assets before work could begin so it represents a significant time saving for us."

Business development director for Teesside-based CorDEX Instruments, Marcus Halliday said: "We have refined and updated our digital camera range following excellent feedback from industry. The ToughPIX 2303XP is the next generation in explosion proof digital camera technology which offers the very latest functionality and the best possible results in the field."

CorDEX Instruments has also developed CorDEX CONNECT™ - a desktop package that boosts the capabilities of ToughPIX 2300XP Series cameras and is included as a complimentary 'add-on' package for customers.

CONNECT™ allows users to exclusively organise and manage information and images taken in the field with the ToughPIX 2300XP Series. It can generate reports and quickly manipulate images downloaded onto the system. Users can simply download images, edit then instantly annotate to produce reports.

CorDEX has developed technologies ideally suited to the hazardous environments of the energy industry. Its intrinsically safe and explosion-proof equipment eliminates the need for shutdown or hot work permits in Non Destructive Testing (NDT) and inspection.

The UK headquartered company has a network of distributors across the North America, South America, Africa, Australasia, Europe, South East Asia and the Middle East. For more information, visit http://www.cordexinstruments.com