Design of Oil Pipeline Monitoring System based on Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

The oil export industry dominates the economy of the world and it depends heavily on oil pipelines. Exposed pipelines are prone to malfunctioning due to intentional or unintentional tampering and vandalism, which is usually caused by damaging form of either knocking or drilling. Continuous structure health monitoring (SHM) of pipelines using conventional methods is difficult and expensive due to the extensive length of the pipelines and the harsh environment. Recent development in printed electronic circuits and microcontrollers open new possibilities in the field of monitoring and have proven their practicality in vibration monitoring process. This paper presents a monitoring system for pipeline heal of the structure based on the wireless sensor network. The system senses the pipeline vibration and relays the data to a base station for the procession. A WSN consists of three nodes is designed and implemented. Each node is built around 32-bit ARM core microcontroller, and equipped with an accelerometer to measure the pipeline vibration. The measurements of each sensor are collected wirelessly through ZigBee protocol to a base station. Results on a 2 m pipeline sample show the ability of the system to precisely detect damaging events e.g. knocking and drilling to the pipeline.