Pipeline Bonded Joints Assembly and Operation Health Monitoring with Embedded FBG Sensors †

Abstract

Offshore oil and gas platforms present a harsh environment for their installed infrastructure, with pipelines that are subjected to both a corrosive atmosphere and transport of aggressive chemicals being the most critical. These conditions have prompted the industry to substitute metallic pipelines for composite counterparts, often made from fiber-reinforced plastics assembled with bonded joints. Various technologies have emerged in recent years to assess the health of these composite pipelines. In particular, robust speckle metrology techniques such as shearography, although not capable of long-term monitoring, have produced very satisfactory results. However, these inspection techniques require specialized equipment and trained personnel to be flown to offshore platforms, which can incur in non-trivial inspection costs. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a robust and cost-effective approach to monitor pipeline bonded joints during assembly and operation using fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors embedded into the joints’ adhesive layer. This approach allows for informed decisions on when to perform targeted in-depth inspections (e.g., with shearography) based on both real-time and long-term feedback of the FBG sensors data, resulting in lower monitoring costs, a severe increase in monitoring uptime (up to full uptime), and increased operational security.