A Petroleum Pipelines Leakage Monitoring System

The petroleum leakage has been a serious problem these years in China. The leakage, mostly caused by human destruction, lasting a short time with a large amount of loss, is not only an economic loss for the petroleum company, but environmental pollution, a public issue. Thus a monitoring system, which can identify the leakage and locate the leak point in real time, is required. One of the challenges is the sensitivity of the system. The system is expected to respond quickly to locate the point so that the security personnel can find and mend the orifice in time. Another challenge is the accuracy of the locating result. Because of the features of Chinese petroleum: high viscosity, high wax content and high freezing point, the sound wave speed in the oil is not a constant along the pipeline and the leak point calculated by the traditional negative pressure wave method are invalid. In this paper, a modified negative pressure wave method was put forward according to the variation of the wave speed. A wavelet-based algorithm applied to calculate the leak point gives fairly satisfied results. The data acquisition, signal processing and the structure of the pipeline leakage monitoring system (PLMS) were analyzed. The system has played a big role on the pipeline network in Shengli Oil Field and long pipelines of East China Oil Bureau.