Structural health monitoring of oil pipeline using wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Due to the rapid developments in electronics and computing, wireless monitoring of devices and equipment is becoming a suitable option, and wireless sensors are receiving much attention compared to other traditional monitoring systems. This research presents the design of a wireless system to monitor the health of the structure of oil pipelines on the basis of vibration monitoring to detect the harmful events that may be exposed to the pipelines such as drilling or breakage, etc. and diagnose them early to avoid the damages that result from them, which often lead to serious consequences and great economic losses, and may lead To massive loss of life and bad social impact. The monitoring system was designed and implemented using a three-node wireless sensor network (WSN). Each node consists of an accelerometer that measures vibration and a 32-bit ARM microcontroller that sends data to the coordinator node (base station) for data collection and analysis. The received pipe vibration signal is analyzed for several different states. Normal state(no event), knocking state by hand hammer, and drilling state by an electric drill. The results obtained showed the ability of the proposed system to accurately detect harmful events that may be exposed to pipelines.