DETECTION OF UNAUTHORIZED CONSTRUCTION EQUIPMENT IN PIPELINE RIGHT-OF-WAYS

Huebler, James E.

National Energy Technology Laboratory (U.S.)

关键词: Death;    Natural Gas;    Dollars;    Fibers;    Pipelines;   

DOI  :  10.2172/803734
RP-ID  :  FC26-01NT41160--03
RP-ID  :  FC26-01NT41160
RP-ID  :  803734

美国|英语

来源: UNT Digital Library

【 摘 要 】

Natural gas transmission companies mark the right-of-way areas where pipelines are buried with warning signs to prevent accidental third-party damage. Nevertheless, pipelines are sometimes damaged by third-party construction equipment. A single incident can be devastating, causing death and millions of dollars of property loss. This damage would be prevented if potentially hazardous construction equipment could be detected, identified, and an alert given before the pipeline was damaged. The Gas Technology Institute (GTI) is developing a system to solve this problem by using an optical fiber as a distributed sensor and interrogating the fiber with an custom optical time domain reflectometer. Key issues are the ability to detect encroachment and the ability to discriminate among potentially hazardous and benign encroachments. The work performed in the third quarter of the project (2nd quarter of 2002) includes design of the diode laser driver and high-speed detector electronics and programming of the custom optical time domain reflectometer.