I TONY ALFANO I
Tony Alfano Product Line Director Pipeline in Digital Solutions A LITTLE BIT ABOUT MYSELF I am currently living in Columbus, Ohio with my wife of 15 years and our three highly energetic boys ages 9, 5, and 4. I have lived in Columbus since graduate school for Mechanical Engineering. I was lucky enough to land a fantastic job after graduation at a local consulting company, CC Technologies who specialized in pipelines. While the extent of my knowledge of pipelines were limited to a few chapters on thin-walled-pressure vessels in school, I was intrigued by the breadth and depth of the challenges you could face as a consultant. Many things have changed since that time, including becoming acquired by DNV. This acquisition really opened the door to even broader challenges and the ability to collaborate with colleagues across the globe. I have always felt a strong personal connection to DNV’s purpose of safeguarding life, property,
Tony studying corrosion and damaged portions of a pipeline.
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and the environment and this has been a common focus in the roles I have had since joining. PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE AND WORK EXPERIENCE If you have never studied them, pipelines may seem like a fairly simple asset to maintain. After all, they are just big metal tubes, right? As with anything you study, the more you dig into the issues, the more complicated things can be. Maintaining the integrity of pipelines is particularly challenging since they are most often inaccessible (buried or subsea) and can be quite long. Take a single joint of pipe; this pipe has perhaps 15 attributes you need to know from construction (size, age, material, coating, manufacturer, weld method, etc.), another ten attributes from the latest inspection (severity of cracks or corrosion, dents, etc), and another 25 attributes from outside data sources such as the type of soil it is buried in, proximity to seismic activity, or the number of potential fatalities which would
