Aim: Leakage detection for long pipelines of oil or gas.

Technologies: Distributed Temperature Sensor

Description: The capability of the distributed sensors of profiling the temperature over long distances can be usefully exploited for detecting and locating leakages 24/7, with high accuracy and meter-scale spatial precision for tens of kilometers, of both aerial and buried pipelines.
In fact, leakages of oil or gas induce local variation in temperature which can be early detected by a sensing cable, properly deployed along the pipeline. Several placements of the cable are suitable, in dependence of the specific requirements of the project, and for that reason, preliminary design services are offered by INFIBRA TECHNOLOGIES.
Raman-based distributed temperature sensors do not suffer of the typical strain-temperature cross-sensitivity of Brillouin-based sensors, so show more robustness to the false alarms induced by strain variations, e.g. caused by landslides, which could be understood as temperature variations.
Moreover, a pipelines monitoring strategy based on our DTS technologies can lead to a complete flow assurance system for production flowlines, optimizing temperature heating systems or identifying anomalies.