Real-time distributed oil/gas pipeline security pre warning system based on Φ-OTDR

With the rapid development of the national economy, long distance oil/gas pipeline transportation system plays a more and more important role in people's daily life. However, the third party damages such as improper construction, illegal drilling and natural disasters still pose a huge threat for pipeline security in practical applications. Hence, there is a strong need for a pipeline security pre-warning system which can detect these potential threats in real-time along a few meters to tens of kilometers. In this paper, a real-time distributed oil/gas pipeline security pre-warning system based on the Φ-OTDR technology is proposed. The experimental platform is established in the laboratory. In addition, a high speed acquisition system based on FPGA is designed. The invalid part between two adjacent Rayleigh back-scattering traces is removed, which reduces the amount of data and improves the operating efficiency. Software design is implemented in visual C++ by utilizing Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) under the Windows environment. The experimental results show that the system is able to detect vibration in real time over a total fiber length of 10 km, with a spatial resolution of 20 m.