Authors

1 University of Technology, Control and System Department, Baghdad, Iraq

2 University of Technology, Communication Department, Baghdad, Iraq

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.

Keywords