Volume 09,Issue 01

IMU Measurement-based Bending and Deformation Identification Method for Oil and Gas Pipelines

Authors

Linjie Ma, Lin Wang

Abstract
Oil and gas pipelines are susceptible to local bending deformation, threatening pipeline transportation’s safety. In-line inspection with inertial measurement units (IMU) is currently the main bending deformation inspection method for buried pipelines. However, the traditional bending strain calculating method based on IMU is influenced by the inherent features of the pipeline which may lead to inaccurate results and cannot truly reflect the bending deformation. To tackle this problem, a novel IMU-based bending strain calculation method is proposed to classify pipe segment, which first extracts the feature data of different pipe segments followed by classifying them into 5 types, namely hot elbow, cold elbow, weld, dent and bending deformation, and finally distinguishes bending deformation segments optimally., After analyzing the differences in bending strain values among five types of pipe features, an effective bending strain-based pipeline feature segment extraction algorithm is proposed, and classification methods are set up for different pipe features. The results show that the proposed method can effectively identify different pipe features and distinguish bending deformation segments. The recognition accuracy for elbow, weld, and dent are 99.35%, 93%, and 90.2%, respectively.

Keyword: Oil and gas pipelines, In-line inspection, IMU, Bending strain.

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