Monitoring Stress/Strain in Buried Pipelines Through the Use of Fiber Bragg Grating Sensors

ECOPETROL S.A. has been working since 2006 in Pipeline Integrity Management Process. In that process, the threat related to climate and external forces play an important role, because of the vulnerability of ECOPETROL pipelines to this threat, not only by the geomorphology of Colombia, but also because of the strong impact of climate phenomenon such as “La Niña”, that consists in an unusual quantity of rain precipitation, represented in the increasing of slopes instability that affects the rights of way. Due to these events and the evolution of optical strain sensors monitoring technology, ECOPETROL has introduced an instrumentation pipeline program for monitoring the strain and advanced in the understanding of the behavior of pipelines. This paper describes the technology selected, the criteria used to select the monitoring sites and the thresholds stress/strain. The results of monitoring are discussed for a particular case.