PIG [Pipe Inspection Gauge]: An Artificial Dustman for Cross Country Pipelines

Abstract

Due to aging infrastructure & hostile operating environment, the pipelines in oil industry also faces the all-time threat of corrosion & erosion affecting leakage in the pipelines, causing emergency plant shutdown triggering huge economical, infrastructure and sometimes human loss and also makes the refinery inoperable for least 7 days. The inspection, cleaning and monitoring techniques for critical components of oil pipelines is based on robotics. India ranks second in Asia for its overall oil reserve but to meet the rising demands of oil, India is the fifth largest importer of crude oil in the world. Cross country pipelines are a safest, economical and most eco-friendly method of transportation of crude oil imported to India, flowing from offshore to a petrochemical plant. These pipelines are the arteries and veins of the fuel industry, similar to natural one in these artificial arteries the crude oil is continuously flowing in deeply buried cross-country pipelines containing slug and wax which get deposited within the pipeline creating a blockage and the situation gets even worse due to the presence of corrosion & erosion because of their. In this research, we have focused on details of a pipe inspection gauge robot which can be used for cleaning and leakage detection of cross-country pipelines which runs with the current of crude oil within the buried pipelines.