In-line inspection of pipelines by using a smart Pig (ITION) and multivariate statistical analysis

Abstract

The ferrous pipe structures of oil and gas production and, the transmission pipelines are, in majority, buried. Nowadays, phenomena like corrosion, mechanical stress, soil erosion, worker mistakes and damages caused by third parts have generated several problems over pipelines. Thus, major investment on integrity programs with In-Line Inspection Tools has been improved in order to examine the pipelines and avoid environmental, financial and social disasters. Recently in Colombia, the Research Institute of Corrosion - CIC (Corporacion para la Investigacion de la Corrosion) runs their own smart pig ILI tool in pipelines. The inspection technology is based on inertial and operational trends, ITION (Inertial Technology Inspection and Operational Trends). Up to date, the technology has been tested several times inside of pipelines providing valuable information along of thousand kilometres. These records contain a huge amount of data that sometimes is difficult or impossible to understand by themselves. A univariate statistical analysis can be used to determine the thresholds for each observation variable. However, it does not analyse the correlated information between them. In this way, the main contribution of this work is the development of a methodology based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to monitor the structure by using the whole available variables gathered by ITION. doi: 10.12783/SHM2015/291

Document type: Conference object