C2024-21164 An Overview of Significant Updates to High Voltage Holiday Detection Standards (NACE SP0188/SP0274/SP0490, ASTM D5612/G62, ISO 29601)

Michael Beamish, Lake Barrett - High Voltage Holiday Detectors are commonly used to locate pinholes in coatings by generating a spark when an electrode passes over an area of bare substrate. A paper presented at a recent AMPP conference (C. Walker, V. O’Dea, 2022) provided compelling evidence, and confirmed industry suspicions, that the test voltages specified by nearly every published standard were inadequate to reliably detect all holidays. In response, industry stakeholders worked to build consensus and update the relevant standards with science-based and experimentally-proven specifications that help ensure High Voltage Holiday Detectors are used appropriately, and with the correct voltage settings, to reliably detect holidays. This paper provides a review of these updates.