To maintain pipeline transportation’s optimal efficiency and safety, pipelines must be regularly inspected and cleaned by the pipeline inspection gauge (PIG). Since the PIG passes through the whole pipeline, which is generally tens of kilometers, observing where the PIG is working in real-time is necessary. When the PIG passes through the pipe joint, the vibration signal will generate by the collision between the PIG and the girth weld, which can transmit along the fiber cable besides the pipeline. In this paper, we demonstrate that the optical fiber distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) can acquire the collision vibration in terms of the V pattern in the waterfall diagram, whose vertex is the collision position of PIG. The vertex will not exist when the cable positions are far away from the pipeline, which is relatively common in practice. We proposed an algorithm based on the clustering algorithm and the Hough transform to detect the position of the PIG even when the vertex of the V pattern does not exist. A field experiment shows that the proposed positioning algorithms applied to the DAS can effectively track the PIG online.

中文翻译：

---

基于光纤分布式声传感的管道检测仪定位系统

为了保持管道运输的最佳效率和安全性，管道必须由管道检测仪（PIG）定期检查和清洁。由于PIG贯穿整个管道，一般为数十公里，因此需要实时观察PIG在何处工作。当PIG通过管接头时，PIG与环焊缝碰撞会产生振动信号，可沿光缆传输，除管道外。在本文中，我们证明了光纤分布式声学传感（DAS）可以根据瀑布图中的 V 模式获取碰撞振动，其顶点是 PIG 的碰撞位置。当电缆位置远离管道时，顶点将不存在，这在实践中比较常见。我们提出了一种基于聚类算法和霍夫变换的算法，即使在 V 模式的顶点不存在的情况下，也可以检测 PIG 的位置。现场实验表明，所提出的应用于DAS的定位算法可以有效地在线跟踪PIG。