BARNARD MICROSYSTEMS LIMITED
helping you keep an eye on things...
oil leakage
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Detecting oil leakage from pipelines |
The official opening (cutting from Financial Times) of the 1,768 Km Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, in which BP is the leading shareholder, with a 30.1% shareholding, prompts the thought as to how a leak might be detected in the £ 1.8 billion pipeline.
Here is a suggested way in which to detect leakage, in a cost efficient manner.
Detecting oil leakage...
Lord Browne of BP (right) meeting with local politicians
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A suggested way to detect oil leakage |
Use a small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), on which is mounted a small thermal imaging camera, to fly autonomously along the pipeline, just after sunset, to record the thermal images of the ground, from which one can deduce the thermal heat capacity of the ground, around the pipeline.
Just after sunset, there will be a drop in temperature, just as there will be an increase after sunrise, and one can interpret the thermal images, to estimate the heat capacity of the ground. If these images are taken once a day, one should be able to detect leakage from any of the 60,000 pipeline joints (according to the Sunday Times article), as a change in heat capacity of the ground, in the vicinity of the leaking joint.
In fact, one should have a time dependent view of the changes. This suggested approach rests on the heat capacity of the oil and the ground being different from that of the ground alone.
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