Pipeline health monitoring

Abstract

Worldwide, BP operates many thousand kilometres of pipelines carrying valuable yet toxic and corrosive fluids. The structural integrity of these pipelines is crucial, as any failure may result in environmental damage, economic losses and injuries to personnel. Convention- ally, pipeline integrity is assessed on a time basis. This inherently limits the amount of infor- mation available about its structural health, as any damage which develops in unexpected circumstances or while the pipeline is not being inspected may remain undetected. Such lack of information hinders the reliability of any prognosis and of Risk-Based Inspection and Maintenance strategies, increases the risk of unexpected critical damage development and pipeline failure, and forces the use of costly time-based maintenance, following the safe-life design approach. Conversely, if sufficient information about pipeline integrity were avail- able to produce reliable prognoses, then it would become possible to dramatically reduce the risk of unexpected failures and to utilise cost-efficient condition-based maintenance, which prescribes the replacement of a pipeline only when it is about to suffer critical dam- age and has therefore reached the actual end of its operational life. In this way, pipeline networks would become safer and more reliable while at the same time more productive and less costly. This thesis introduces and demonstrates a Structural Health Monitoring ap- proach that has the potential to fill the integrity information gap and ultimately enable the use of condition-based pipeline maintenance. This approach, embodied by a practical au- tomated pipeline damage detection procedure, complements permanently installed guided wave sensors to create a complete pipeline health monitoring solution. Utilising experimen- tal data from a permanently installed guided wave sensor installed on a purpose-built NPS 8 Schedule 40 pipe loop facility at BP’s Naperville Campus, it is shown that the procedure is very effective at detecting and quantifying actual damage, thereby achieving the intended aim of this thesis.