Design and Development of Pipeline Inspection System

Maintaining the pipeline integrity is very important in petroleum industry. Regular pipeline
inspection is normally conducted. Pipeline Inspection Gauge (PIG) is used for internal inspection
of the pipeline should there be any deformities and appropriate action plan need to be developed
to prevent further deterioration or catastrophe. The PIG is an industrial device that moves by the
driving force of the product flow inside the pipeline for detection of pipeline faults. Data analysis
is conducted from the resulted information obtained after executing the in-line inspection. In this
project, a PIG prototype equipped with Arduino based components is built to represent the actual
industrial pipeline inspection system. The engineering concept is designed. The data of the colour
tapes, distance, speed and shifted angle of the prototype are collected and validated. Colour
sensors, rotary encoder, gyroscope and accelerometer are selected as sensing mechanism of the
system. The data are stored in a memory card to be processed by the MATLAB for final analysis.