Customer – Indian Oil Corporation Ltd.
Country – India
It is common knowledge that pipelines are made of metal; however, there is the potential for damage that can occur during liquid flow through them. One of these defects is metal corrosion.
One of the most important problems to solve in any pipeline system is damage prevention. If the problem is managed, pipelines can serve for an infinitely long time; if not there are severe consequences.
The solution to damage prevention can be found by creating a system with the possibility to predict all potential pipeline damages and to fix them before they can cause more serious problems.
This entails monitoring and analysis of the state of the pipeline.
The main purpose of the Pipeline Monitoring System project was to create a system for the inspection and monitoring of oil pipelines without stopping the pipe’s flow of product.
The method used for the solution was magnetic flux leakage (MFL). MFL allows to detect metal loss due to corrosion, gouging and other defects.
The system we designed includes a combination of hardware and software that allows for the defects of oil pipelines to be determined and located by processing data acquired from Hall (MFL) sensors. The hardware used for data acquisition was the NI Compact RIO, and the software was based on NI LabVIEW.
PMS offers the opportunity to find such defects as corrosion, faulty welds, cracks, leakages, etc.