Dynamic model of a new above-ground pipeline using a Kalman estimator-based system

Pipeline health in the oil and gas industry is crucial, therefore a priori prediction of failure is of particular interest to those industries. This paper will present a new approach for estimating the vibration of a pipeline using a Linear Quadratic Estimator (LQE) with minimal feedback measurement. The workhorse of this approach is a Kalman estimator-based system (KE) that "predicts" vibration at any location along the pipeline utilizing both a structural dynamic model and measurements from sensors placed at strategic locations on the pipeline. A dynamic model of the pipeline is constructed from the first 10 mode shapes and natural frequencies of the pipe section which is obtained using finite element modeling (FEM). A sequence of experiments were conducted to verily the outcome of this approach in which, DSpace in conjunction with Matlab are used to incorporate the hardware into the estimation loop for the purpose of examining the validity of the proposed approach. Estimates generated by the LQE are compared with actual measurements and the results show that the proposed approach is able to predict the vibration of the pipe at any location with good accuracy. The LQE requires minimal physical measurement to produce accurate estimates of the vibration signature at any location along the pipeline span.