Remote Pipeline Monitoring Security System

Abstract

Pipelines are regarded as the lifelines of the national economy of most oil producing countries. This is because these pipelines which cover thousands of kilometers are used to transport large volumes of refined and unrefined petroleum products, crude oil and natural gas. These pipelines often come under terrorist attacks and vandalism which can lead to pollution problems, theft of the contents of the pipeline and huge economic loss. In view of this, it is very necessary that these pipelines are monitored from time to time to forestall these losses. Manual monitoring of pipelines is a very expensive process and also dangerous especially in hazardous environments. Remote monitoring of these pipelines involves monitoring the pipelines from remote locations. This research work monitors pipelines by using remote monitoring to wirelessly monitor the pipelines in real time and reports to the control center whenever it gets a value above the threshold value. The parameters monitored are temperature around the pipeline, relative humidity surrounding the pipeline, dew point of the pipeline environment, the amount of carbon monoxide present, the amount of liquefied petroleum gas leakages, the movement of people around the facility, fire and smoke. A monitoring device for monitoring these parameters was designed and constructed and a software was developed in C- language which interfaced with the hardware to provide a robust solution for remotely monitoring the pipelines. The result of this research effort is a robust solution for the wireless monitoring of the pipelines of the different parameters embedded together.