Development and Testing of a Post-Installable Deepwater Monitoring System Using Fiber-Optic Sensors

One of the largest movers of the world economy is the oil and gas industry. The industry generates billions of barrels of oil to match more than half the world’s energy demands. Production of energy products at such a massive scale is supported by the equally massive oil and gas infrastructure sprawling around the globe. Especially characteristic of the industry are vast networks of pipelines that traverse tens of thousands of miles of land and sea to carry oil and gas from the deepest parts of the earth to faraway destinations. With such lengths come increased chances for damage, which can have disastrous consequences owing to the hazardous substances typically carried by pipelines. Subsea pipelines in particular face increased risk due to the typically harsher environments, the difficulty of accessing deepwater pipelines, and the possibility of sea currents spreading leaked oil across a wide area. The opportunity for research and engineering to overcome the challenge of subsea inspection and monitoring is tremendous and the progress in this area is continuously generating exciting new developments that may have far reaching benefits far outside of subsea pipeline inspection and monitoring. Thus, this review covers the most often used subsea inspection and monitoring technologies as well as their most recent developments and future trends.

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“…(Left) Design of subsea pipeline clamp containing FBG sensors. 212 (Right) Photo of FBG clamp installed on a subsea pipeline. 213 …”

Section: Sensing Strategies For Subsea Pipeline Shmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inspection and monitoring systems subsea pipelines: A review paper

El-Borgi

Patil

et al. 2019

Structural Health Monitoring

147

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“…Both classical and modern instruments are used for flood monitoring. Easily detects the leakage and defect Still in research process to apply for BCPs [32] Radiography Easily distinguishes deep layers of BCPs Can be the cause of damage for humans and sea animals [33] Fiber optics Precise results with less loss of data Installation is tedious, and permanent installation is required for it [34] From Table 8, it is observed that the output readings from classical instruments like acoustic emissions can be interrupted on irregular surface applications. Ground penetrating radar (GPR) and electrical field signature can provide moderate results with their continuous attachment to the observation units.…”

Section: Floodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Further, external surface load such as traffic, heavy equipment, and superstructure built on the BCPs also impact its integrity [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. Likewise, flood [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34], blasting [35][36][37] and earthquakes [38][39][40][41][42][43][44] also affect the safe operations of BCPs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identification of Factors Influencing Sustainability of Buried Continuous Pipelines

Akram

Zülfikar

2020

Sustainability

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Threat to the sustainability of buried continuous pipelines (BCPs) can be associated with different factors such as corrosion, natural hazards, and third-party influences. In the past, these factors have been discussed independently by various researchers. Despite these studies, there is still space for a comprehensive review report to be performed in this domain. The purpose of this article is to manage, classify, and describe the literature work done in this sphere. Firstly, the screening of various factors based on their damage criteria has been carried out. An environmental analysis is performed to review the impact of different parameters that can influence the sustainability of BCPs. Further, a technical review on primary factors has been done to examine and measure the causes, damages, mitigation, and inspection techniques. In the last stage, review based decision has been performed. Results of the current study shows that research contribution for corrosion and earthquake factors are in an advanced stage, followed by flood and external surface loads, that are still in progress. However, temperature variations and blast factors are in a premature phase and need broad inspection and research support.

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“…The Clear Gulf JIP relies on oil and gas industry experts as well as test facilities at NASA. While the sensors on this project were dry-installed, the post-installed clamp design and adhesion to the pipe is recently improved with fundamental research and testing conducted by NASA Johnson Space Center [13,14] for long-term service life verification. The new clamp design is shown in Figure 12 with several enhancements over the prior clamp design [4,5].…”

Section: Long-term Development With Clear Gulf Jipmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Flow Assurance System With High Speed Subsea Fiber Optic Monitoring of Pressure and Temperature

Hedengren

Brower²,

Wilson³

et al. 2018

Volume 5: Pipelines, Risers, and Subsea Systems

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Subsea production control systems are instrumented to constantly monitor flowline pressure and temperature at key locations to prevent plugging and introduce mitigating control strategies. New fiber optic sensors with ruggedized construction and non-electrical components are subjected to accelerated aging tests and deployed in several installations with long service life. An overview of current progress with fiber optic technology is provided for fatigue monitoring, temperature, pressure, and strain sensing. Recent developments include improved service life, novel bonding methods, pipeline sensor station improvements, sensor calibration, and long-term fatigue analysis. The latest advancements are validated on multiple installations on a subsea tieback in the deepwater Mississippi Canyon of the Gulf of Mexico at 6,500 ft depth. A prior third-party sensor design experienced multiple non-recoverable sensor failures. A new sensor station design is employed on two Flowline Terminations to monitor pressure and temperature at a rate of 100 Hz. Subsea tiebacks are susceptible to flow assurance issues caused by plugging events such as hydrate formation. The system was originally designed to track pig location but transitioned to pressure and temperature sensing. An issue with the transition was the lack of calibration relating the fiber Bragg grating (FBG) strain levels to the actual process conditions. A novel method is presented for in situ adjustment of the sensor array calibration. During the calibration procedure, the sensors produced unanticipated results during pipeline flow shut-in and later startup operations. The sensors helped uncover a configuration of the flowline and sensor locations that is valuable for detecting hydrate forming conditions at a key junction location. The sensors are located before and after the junction of two flowlines in the mixing zone of the pipeline streams. The novel contributions of this study are the high speed data collection, in situ fiber optic calibration, review of advancements in fiber optic sensing technology, and a field case study with multiple sensing arrays. The developments are part of the Clear Gulf study, a collaboration between the offshore energy industry and NASA that was formed in 2010. The objective of the Clear Gulf study is to employ space technology and testing facilities for use in the up-stream industry to advance subsea sensor technology. The highly sensitive monitoring systems developed as part of this study are used to give early warnings for flow assurance issues, structural failures, or catastrophic events.

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Development and Testing of a Post-Installable Deepwater Monitoring System Using Fiber-Optic Sensors

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Inspection and monitoring systems subsea pipelines: A review paper

Inspection and monitoring systems subsea pipelines: A review paper

Identification of Factors Influencing Sustainability of Buried Continuous Pipelines

New Flow Assurance System With High Speed Subsea Fiber Optic Monitoring of Pressure and Temperature

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