Abstract
Submarine pipelines are important resource delivery devices between land and ocean. For safety reasons, pipelines are often embedded beneath the seabed at a certain depth, to reduce the risk of direct damage to the pipeline. In the past, various kinds of detection equipment have been used for pipeline inspection, to ensure the normal operation of pipelines in practical applications. Acoustic detection technology is the dominant method to monitor buried submarine pipelines. Extracting and integrating the information in acoustic images, such as the route and burial depth, can help to monitor the status of a pipeline. However, most of the existing methods are based on limited parameters, and they cannot be used to precisely detect and locate a submarine pipeline under complex conditions. In this study, a multi-sensor surveying system was used, which integrates a sub-bottom profiler (SBP) and the Shipborne Over- and Under-Water Integrated Mobile Mapping System (SiOUMMS) on the same ship. The data acquired in this system include acoustic profile images and the over- and under-water topography of the pipeline route area. We also designed a position deviation correction method to improve the accuracy of the pipeline detection positioning, i.e., pipeline positioning correction in the real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning data and pipeline horizontal route correction in the integrated data. Compared with the uncorrected pipeline detection positioning result, the reliability of the pipeline inspection result is greatly improved, and the effectiveness and merit of the proposed method are clearly demonstrated. Finally, we conducted a buried pipeline safety assessment for the installation of newly designed wharf piles at Mawan Port of Shenzhen, China, where the results showed that one of the first rows of wharf piles would collide with the sewage pipeline.
Highlights
A submarine pipeline is a pipeline that is laid on the seabed for resource delivery between land and ocean
Three main advantages of the integrated system are follows: 1) In the shipboard integrated system, each measurement sensor shares a set of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data, which can reduce the influence of systematic deviation and avoid the decrease in accuracy caused by the data splicing process
2) The characteristic points of over-water topography are easy to verify by the use of a measuring device on land, such as real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning or a total station, and can be used to correct the deviation of the over-water topographic survey, improving the accuracy of the under-water topographic survey
Summary
A submarine pipeline is a pipeline that is laid on the seabed for resource delivery between land and ocean. Submarine pipelines are primarily used to carry oil, gas, or water, and they can be regarded as the lifelines that ensure the safe and efficient transportation of different kinds of basic supplies [1]. The pipelines are usually buried beneath the seabed at a certain depth, to reduce the possibility of direct damage to the pipeline. The associate editor coordinating the review of this article and approving it for publication was Huawei Chen. Depth, the pipeline can be directly laid on the seabed [2]. Pipelines are sensitive to a wide variety of damage and defects, such as corrosion and deformation [3]–[5]. To avoid potential disasters brought about by fracture or leakage, periodic surveying and inspection of a pipeline are adopted as the main maintenance tasks [2], [6]
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