The Key Technology Study Of Liquefied Petroleum Gas Transport Pan Tank Leak Detection Based On Optical Fiber Sensing Technology

The demand for various chemicals increase as the industrial production booming development, the amount of hazardous chemicals in transportation is growing rapidly. In road transport, transport tanks can be regarded as a "floating bomb." In recent years, the news about transport tank accident of hazardous chemicals is often found. This harm to the social, economic, production and people’s lives loss and challenge the public safety. In the existing accident statistics, leak and burning, explosions due to leakage are the main reason for accidents incurred. Therefore, how to ensure the tanks safety during transportation, and propose warning or assess the extent of the disaster before the accident, became the research that concerned about by our country and pay close attention to all sectors of researchers.Liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) is an important petrochemical materials and energy fuels. It has been widely used in industrial, commercial and residential fuel. It is typical representative in the road transport of hazardous chemicals. Therefore, it is essential for the safe condition of LPG transport tanks to determine leakage in the tank during transportation. In particular a traffic accident occurred, it has an important scientific value and social value in detection leakage, assessment the degree of leakage and so on. This article intended to study the leakage of liquefied petroleum gas tank during transportation and the physical effects when leakage happened. Thus we designed two type of optical fiber sensors based on interferometers. The theoretical analysis and experimental results on the coupling method, operation principle and detection sensitivity were investigated. Details are as follows.This article describes the significance of LPG transport tank leak detection and conventional leak detection methods. The analysis of the principle and characteristics about acoustic emission was given. The influence of acoustic emission signal on the optic fiber and coupling issue of acoustic emission signal transmission were emphasis. Then two kind sensors based on interferometer was proposed, one is a single-mode fiber-based Mach-Zehnder (M-Z) optical fiber interference, the other is based on orthogonal polarization mode interference in the polarization maintaining fiber (PMF). The key parameters included the detection sensitivity, stability was experimentally compared. Finally, we accomplished the experimental investigation by applying the sensor on the leakage simulation models of liquefied petroleum gas tank.It has great significance to achieve the safety state testing for the hazardous chemicals tanks for improving transportation effectiveness and reducing losses caused by secondary disasters after the accident. It is the demand of development in science and technology. It possessed important academic significance and social value.