Smart Cup for In-Situ 3D Measurement of Wall-Mounted Debris via 2D Sensing Grid in Production Pipelines

The accumulation of separated out impurities from pipeline transported medium onto the pipe wall is a major cause of downtime maintenance of oil and gas production systems. To regularly scrub off wall-mounted debris and probe the severity, pipeline inspection gauges (PIG) are the state-of-the-art tools developed for the task, using the pressure differential across the device as the driving force, and tag-along sensing equipment for wall defects measurement. Currently, the PIG propulsion and sensing tasks are realized by separate compartments, limited to large diameter operations. In this work, a soft solution for medium to small diameter pipelines has been demonstrated. The smart cup with integrated sensing grid is proposed to achieve integrated wall-mounted debris dimensional measurement, without the need of additional sensors. To achieve the goal, this work starts from the mathematical modelling of the geometric problem, to new fabrication procedures, experimental setup, and finally finishes with validation results. Initial results have shown that using the proposed smart cup, the wall-mounted debris can be detected, with modelling error maxed at 5.1%, and deformation detection accuracy between 1.18% and 1.92% with respect to the outer diameter.