Development of an Impact Monitoring System for Petroleum Pipelines

Third party damage to petroleum pipelines can be catastrophic if undetected. Hence, the need for an effective technique to monitor petroleum pipelines for this damage as it occurs. In this paper, a wave propagation model with attenuation and dispersion coefficients built into it is used to simulate the pulse, generated at the point of impact, which propagates along the pipeline. This is used to simulate the process of measuring the propagating pulse and hence to detect the damage and estimate its location along the pipeline. The problem of noise addition, which introduces uncertainty in the estimation of the impact location and magnitude of the pulse, was analysed. The model was used to simulate measurements of the distorted and noisy pulse from which an estimate of the initial impact location and magnitude of the pulse was made. The result shows that for good estimation of the impact location and magnitude of the pulse, the noise to pulse signal ratio should be between 0 and 0.12.