EMBEDDED SYSTEM BASED SUBSEA OIL PIPELINE MONITORING SYSTEM USING MULTI-FUNCTIONAL SENSORS

Abstract

The concept of employing embedded systems with sensor network for monitoring underwater oil pipelines infrastructures has been investigated by many researchers. This work presents a similar demonstration of a monitoring system detecting temperature and motion of the underwater pipelines, using microcontrollers, sensors and communication via RF. In this project, Optical communication is employed for monitoring purposes. To support the project’s goals during different phases of pipeline installation, RF communication was found to be the ideal complementary solution. The proposed system provides continuous data regarding the acceleration, the local magnetic field and the temperature of the pipeline using different sensors. An energy harvesting system was also designed to meet the monitoring system’s power requirements. In my thesis, two low power RF communication protocols, SimpliciTI and ZigBee, have been explored and compared for the pipeline monitoring systems. A C# based Graphical Universal Interface was designed to interact with the monitoring system.