An infrared non-contact framework for monitoring the liquid levels in natural gas pipelines. (2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Song, Huajun; Zhou, Guangbing; Di, Mengmeng; Ren, Peng
• Is Part Of: International journal of oil, gas and coal technology. Volume 15:Number 3(2017)
• Page Start: 317
• Page End: 327
• Publication Date: 2017
• Subjects: natural gas transportation -- liquid level monitoring -- non-contact infrared imaging measurement -- graph-cuts segmentation -- Puguang natural gas field; Petroleum as fuel -- Periodicals; Gas as fuel -- Periodicals; Coal -- Periodicals; Biomass energy -- Periodicals; Hydrogen as fuel -- Periodicals; 662.6
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1753-3309

Abstract

We present a non-contact scheme for monitoring liquid in natural gas transportation pipelines. We first conduct a short-time heating to the outer wall of one investigated pipe. Shortly after the heating, the temperature of the part of the pipe wall touching liquid is supposed to be lower than that of the liquid non-touching part. We then use an infrared thermal sensor to capture images of the pipe wall, which characterise the temperature distributions for natural gas and liquid inside the pipe. We apply the graph-cuts algorithm to automatically segmenting the liquid regions from the infrared images, which result in an indication of the liquid level inside the pipeline. The experimental results obtained from both our laboratory and the China Puguang natural gas field indicate that the error rate of our method is less than 10%, which qualifies the practical requirement for liquid level measurement. [Received: November 11, 2014; Accepted: June 18, 2016]