acK: know your pipeline
Toward near-real-time monitoring of pipelines
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Calculating small distances between lat/long coordinates using Excel
*(Technical)* The most common GIS distance calculation, the Spherical Law of Cosines (SLoC), gives poor results at short distances. This is an issue when calculating joint lengths using latitude/ longitude pairs. At these short distances, the spherical law of cosines has a precision of only 4.5%. In contrast, the three alternate techniques I compare with…
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Combining sensing modalities
*(Technical)* Suppose you have had multiple sensors traverse a section of pipe with the intent of detecting axial cracking. Rather than concern ourselves with which tool does the “best” at detecting the phenomenon, we can treat the signal from each inspection as a piece of evidence supporting or refuting the hypothesis that axial cracking is…
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acK – part 1: Overview
*(2-minute read)* Short-cycle events like river scouring, tampering, and aggressive corrosion growth can compromise pipeline integrity between inspections and catch an operator unaware. acK for pipelines is a set of tools and practices to address these events using inexpensive, high-temporal-resolution pipeline state monitoring.
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A game of outliers
*(2-minute read)*Best practices are already pretty good. Best integrity management practices catch almost all cases of impending failures. What we need is a better way of catching outliers.
Get Involved…
What’s going on?
We are building hardware, writing software, and doing research to support near-real-time pipeline monitoring. See this posting for a list of all the projects we are working on. Everything is open source, for the benefit of the contributors. If you contribute, you will benefit.
Contribute your time…
At the moment we need help with the following…
- Industry contacts – help us get the word out
- Utility pigging – do you run or make cleaning pigs?
- Computing services – we need help in the cloud, and with media
- Lawyering – we need to protect ourselves and keep things fair
- Accounting – help us keep track of all the moving parts?
Contribute your data…
Data is the lifeblood of this project. The perfect data set would look like a PIM. It would consist of multiple looks at the same pipe segment with different tools, technologies, and mechanisms.
Contribute your cash…
What we can’t get with contributions of time, we will need to pay for. We are going to need good lawyering and accounting immediately.
get in touch…
Please use the form to the right to connect with us. Tell us how you want to get involved.
You can also send an email to: ack@craigchamplin.com
We are located in Golden, Colorado, USA
acK for pipeline integrity 