Abstract
Natural gas pipeline leaks can lead to serious and dangerous accidents that can cause great losses of life and property. Therefore, detecting natural gas pipeline leaks has always been an important subject. The negative pressure wave (NPW) method is currently the most widely used leakage detection method. Generally, this method uses pressure sensors to detect NPW signals to assess the leak and determine the location of the leakage point. However, the installation of a pressure sensor requires penetrating the pipeline structure, so the sensor intervals are often distant, leading to large signal attenuations and the ineffective detection of small leaks. An NPW method based on fiber Bragg grating (FBG) strain sensors is proposed in this paper which detects NPWs by monitoring the annular strain of the pipeline. Moreover, due to the advantages of nondestructive installation FBG strain sensors can be arranged closer along the distance of the pipeline, the attenuation of the NPW is small and the detection of leaks is improved. This method is tested through experiments and compared with a pressure sensor-based method; the experimental results verify that the proposed method is more effective in detecting natural gas pipeline leaks.
Highlights
Natural gas pipelines are the preferred method of natural gas transmission
The fiber Bragg grating (FBG) strain sensors are set at intervals along the pipeline, so that when a leak occurs in some parts of the pipeline, the leak point is very close to the sensors on both sides. erefore, the attenuation of the negative pressure wave (NPW) is very small and the pressure value of the NPW at the sensors is relatively large which overcomes the high failure rate of the NPW method based on a pressure sensor
The propagation and attenuation of NPWs in natural gas pipelines are introduced, the principle of detecting and locating leaks by the pressure sensor-based NPW method is studied, and the disadvantages of this method are noted. en, in view of the shortcomings of the pressure sensor-based NPW method, a method of detecting the NPW in a pipeline by using an FBG strain sensor to monitor the annular strain of the pipeline is proposed and a method based on the FBG strain sensor to detect and locate pipeline leaks is proposed
Summary
Natural gas pipelines are the preferred method of natural gas transmission. as gas is a hazardous material, a leaking or broken gas pipeline can cause great harm to the surrounding environment and personnel. E pressure sensor-based negative pressure wave (NPW) method is widely used in this field because it can avoid the establishment of a complex mathematical model for the pipelines and is easy to operate [8]. Detection technology based on distributed fiber sensors is widely used at present to detect pipeline leaks [9–20]. There are few applications of quasi-distributed optical fiber Bragg grating (FBG) used in the detection of natural gas pipeline leaks [21–25]. Because the main component of natural gas is methane which has stable chemical properties that hinder the expansion of a polymer, this sensor is not suitable for the detection of natural gas pipeline leaks. Based on the abovementioned principles, an FBG strain sensor-based NPW method for natural gas pipeline leak detection is proposed and this method is tested and compared with an experiment
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