Health and structural integrity of monitoring systems: The case study of pressurized pipelines

Abstract

In the operation of some structures, particularly in energy or chemical industry where pressurized pipeline systems are employed, certain unexpected critical situations may occur, which must be definitely avoided. Otherwise, such situations would result in undesirable damage to the environment or even the endangerment of human life. For example, the occurrence of such nonstandard states can significantly affect the safety of high-pressure pipeline systems. The following paper discusses basic physical prerequisites for assembling the systems that can sense loading states and monitor the operational safety conditions of pressure piping systems in the long-run. The appropriate monitoring system hardware with cost-effective data management was designed in order to enable the real-time monitoring of operational safety parameters. Furthermore, the paper presents the results obtained from the measurements of existing real-time safety monitoring systems for selected pipeline systems.