Authors: Nwonye Charles A, Ezema. E. E, Abba. M.O
Abstract: This project is primarily designed to ensure real time oil leakage detection and localization using flow rates and echo principles. Flow station A has a microcontroller as the central control unit with start button and flow meter as inputs while time domain reflectometer (TDR), Sound alarm and Pump as outputs. It also has a modem with which it communicates to other flow stations. Flow station B has the same arrangement as flow station A except that it has only sound alarm as its output. Also, the pipeline that links the two flow stations has copper cables aligned along its length so that any attempt to break the pipeline must first cut any of the copper cables which are the basis to detect exact point of leakage using the TDR. Here, fluid flow between two flow stations is considered and the mass flow rates at both ends are measured and compared to check for possible leakage. For a given length of pipeline (L), Cross sectional area (A) and fluid density (ρ) over a given time (t), there is a threshold maximum for mass flow rate difference between flow station A and flow station B. Once, the difference between the two mass flow rates at the two flow stations A and B becomes higher than the given threshold, leakage has occurred, alarm will be activated at both flow stations to alert the workers and the time domain reflectometer (TDR) will be activated at the flow station A. The TDR will send a pulse over the copper cables aligned along the length of the pipeline since for leakage to occur one of the copper cables aligned along the length of the pipeline must have been tampered with. When a pulse is sent across the copper cables, the pulse will be reflected back at a point where the cable is cut. Hence, the TDR measures the time interval between when the pulse is sent to when it was reflected back from the point of leakage as time (t). Then using Echo Equation V=2X/t, where V= Velocity of the sent pulse (3 x 108m/s), hence X=Vt/2 where X is the exact point of leakage as measured from flow station A. The developed system recorded a very low error rate of 0.22% with very high precision.
DOI: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17276591
