Troubleshooting

Owned by Steve Peregrine
Last updated: Jun 22, 2020 by Maciej Krzemiński (Unlicensed)
3 min read

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Troubleshooting

It is not uncommon for clients from all territories to call the WinCan support teams with questions about their data reports.

The most common issues seen are a lack of understanding of what data is being presented and bad equipment setup, most often bad (or no) calibration.

Everything that is needed to understand these problems is included in the text of this manual, but as a first port of call, support teams and clients should look carefully at the following data while trying to figure what is happening or why the graph ‘looks’ wrong:

  • The section header data - look closely at:

    • The pipe depths and pipe altitudes above sea level.

    • The inspection direction.

  • The inclination test direction - in the inclination panel look at the green and blue arrows and which end of the horizontal axis of the graph has the zero value.

  • The vertical scales - understand what they are showing you and compare them with the data values at the top of the panel.

  • The inclination curve - this is probably the most useful piece of information because it is not linked to the altitudes and shows you the actual data points that have been recorded during the test. This is usually the easiest way to get a ‘feeling’ for if the calibration is really bad.

  • The data points - these can also give you a ‘feeling’ of what is going on by scrolling up and down the list you can see if the majority of the points are negative or positive which will help to diagnose problem graphs.

  • The ‘Fit to Altitudes’ button - this can make a bad graph look good but it only hides the fact that the data is bad in the first place and is only available if the vertical altitude values of the pipe are in the header data.

One of the most important part of all inclination testing to fully appreciate is that the inspection direction and the inclination test direction are mutually exclusive - that means that they are completely independent of each other and although they both affect the output, they can both be flipped independently on different tests and inspections.

The WinCan VX Database

Under normal conditions, it should normally be possible to diagnose problems from the inclination panel in WinCan VX without looking any deeper, but in extreme circumstances, it may be useful to look inside the database.

There are two tables that are used for storing this data - SECMES and SECMP:

  • SECMES (Section Measurements) table contains a single record for each inclination test in the project, where the MES_Inspection_FK field of the data record matches the INS_PK of the inspection record in the SECINSP table that this test is linked to.

  • SECMP (Section Measurement Points) contains all of the data points for each measurement test, so again there is a relationship between these tables where MP_Measurement_FK matches the MES_PK.

The data point table will have a lot of records, often more than 300 records per test, but these are just measurements from the camera system. The actual data records only really have 4 valuable columns of data:

  • The X value - this is the distance point measurement.

  • The Y value - this is the attitude point measurement.

  • The Sort Order - this is the measurement point counter number and starts again at 1 for each test (sometimes in very old versions of the software, there may be problems here, but using the ‘Reprocess’ tools in WinCan Vx will help to fix these).

  • The Deleted column - if there are values in this column, this tells us if the user has used the ‘ignore length’ or the ‘delete point’ tools in the user interface.