Scour Monitoring System for Subsea Pipeline Based on Active Thermometry: Numerical and Experimental Studies

Sensors

Xuefeng Zhao¹  Weijie Li¹  Gangbing Song²  Zuo Zhu¹ 

[1] School of Civil Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China;E-Mails:;Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204-4006, USA; E-Mail:

关键词: Brillouin optical fiber sensor;    scour monitoring;    subsea pipeline;    active thermometry;    numerical simulation;   

DOI  :  10.3390/s130201490

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

A scour monitoring system for subsea pipeline based on active thermometry is proposed in this paper. The temperature reading of the proposed system is based on a distributed Brillouin optical fiber sensing technique. A thermal cable acts as the main component of the system, which consists of a heating belt, armored optical fibers and heat-shrinkable tubes which run parallel to the pipeline. The scour-induced free span can be monitored through different heat transfer behaviors of in-water and in-sediment scenarios during heating and cooling processes. Two sets of experiments, including exposing different lengths of the upper surface of the pipeline to water and creating free spans of various lengths, were carried out in laboratory. In both cases, the scour condition was immediately detected by the proposed monitoring system, which confirmed the system is robust and very sensitive. Numerical study of the method was also investigated by using the finite element method (FEM) with ANSYS, resulting in reasonable agreement with the test data. This brand new system provides a promising, low cost, highly precise and flexible approach for scour monitoring of subsea pipelines.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2013 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.