Design And Development Of Oil Pipeline Leak Detection System Of Spherical Inner Detector

As the main energy in 21 st century, oil has affected people's life in all aspects. Its transportation relies on the pipeline set up between two places. However, pipeline leak accident often occurs, which not only pollutes the environment, but also causes huge economic losses and safety accident. Therefore, researching on pipeline leak detection method is of important significance.Researches of oil pipeline leak detection carried out by scholars both at home and abroad starts in an early time, and many effective detection methods are proposed. However, these methods can only identify large leakage, but not small leakage. Pipeline leakage is mostly tiny leakage caused by corrosion. As a result, our research group is aimed to design a kind of spherical pipeline inner detector that can detect small leakage. The detector is pushed by the pressure difference of the pipeline. The signal about the pipeline state is acquired by multiple sensors that attached to the detector. The detector is taken out from the final station of the pipeline, and the signal is analyzed to determine whether the leak occurs and locate the leak location.The passing ability of inner spherical leak detector in the vertical segment of the pipeline is researched firstly to guarantee the detector going through the whole pipeline smoothly. The results show that the passing ability of detector has something to do with the outer diameter of detector and flow velocity. The mechanical structure of the detector, including the overall layout inside the detector, the simulation design of outer diameter and wall thickness, and the joint sealing design is designed then to guarantee the detector have good sealing performance and high pressure resistance. ARM is chosen as the core of the hardware circuit to process and store the signals acquired by each sensor. The hardware circuit design includes the design of power supply module, small signal conditioning module, a variety of data collection and storage module and the communication interface to the host computer module. The design of software platform includes the drivers' design under Linux system such as ADC driver, LED driver, etc. The design and debugging of the application program, which use the multithreaded programming method, implement multiple sensor synchronous collection and storage, and the self-check of each sensor and battery, and some other functions. Finally, the performance of the pipeline leak detection system is verified by experiment. The results show that, the detector can go through the vertical segment of the experiment pipe smoothly, and collect useful information, which demonstrates the rationality of the design.