Pipeline Monitoring solution: real-time performance + leak detection.

Pipeline Monitoring solution: get real-time asset understanding + predictive insights that improve performance, measurably.

The solution.

We designed our Pipeline Monitoring solution on our world-leading Rayven Platform for our customer so that they could monitor the real-time flow and pressure of what was going through their pipelines and create alerts, based on custom-built predictive algorithms, that would fire when something was going awry, such as a pipe break, leak, abnormal pressure or consumption.

When faults are detected early, maintenance can take place quickly and reduce the environmental damage and minimise losses. The sensor installations also only require optical fibre, so no control of power system lines are needed, which means minimum ongoing maintenance will be needed.

Defining what data to collect is critical.
In order to create this solution, we first identified the key data required to achieve the desired business objectives. In our Pipeline Monitoring solution, this included:

1. Pipeline flow
   
2. Pressure
3. Production schedule
   
4. Pump status
5. Temperature.

Initial goals of the solution.
Working with our partners, we installed optical fibre sensors to a 4G gateway, so that our Pipeline Monitoring solution could then:

1. Monitor critical operational data received from the equipment via a web-based system
2. Ensure device management monitoring was set in place
3. Define business logic for the application in order to meet the business objectives
4. Provide alarm and alert notifications via email or SMS messages
5. Start collecting historical data to undertake leak detection modelling
6. Provide the right dashboards to the right users with the right insights
7. Test the application, making sure all of the above goals are met, based on the solution architecture.

Before go-live, we tested four critical aspects of our Pipeline Monitoring solution:

Security.
The Rayven Platform is built with security as a top priority and our proprietary security architecture ensures that data is secure at all points of the environment.

The Pipeline Monitoring solution includes data encryption in transit from device-to-cloud, as well as device authentication; security (Bearer) tokens; SSL, AES and RSA encryption; as well as additional device security checks done via automated polling.

Connectivity.
As some areas had good 4G coverage, we utilised a 4G gateway, and then in other areas where there was no 4G, we used LoRa based connectivity.

Data integrity.
Your ability to make the right decisions is entirely reliant on the integrity of the data you collect, therefore, making sure that the Pipeline Monitoring solution has reliable connectivity is key to ensuring your data is always up-to-date and that you can rely on it to make critical business decisions in real-time. In addition, it’s important to check that the data you’re seeing in your dashboard matches the data recorded in the field; this avoids any possibility of false positives with leak alerts.

Industrial data science.
The objectives of the exploratory data analysis was to monitor performance and efficiency, which included:

1. Calculating flow rate by minute, hour, day, and week
2. Forecasting hourly and daily pipeline flows
3. Leak detection with minimal false positives

What’s next?

We are continuing to improve our maintenance forecasting by leveraging machine learning across growing data sets, which will further enhance our leak detection results.