The oil export industry dominates the economy of the world and it depends heavily on oil pipelines. Exposed pipelines are prone to malfunctioning due to intentional or unintentional tampering and vandalism, which is usually caused by damaging form of either knocking or drilling. Continuous structure health monitoring (SHM) of pipelines using conventional methods is difficult and expensive due to the extensive length of the pipelines and the harsh environment.Recent development in printed electronic circuits and microcontrollers open new possibilities in the field of monitoring and have proven their practicality in vibration monitoring process. This paper presents a monitoring system for pipeline heal of the structure based on the wireless sensor network. The system senses the pipeline vibration and relays the data to a base station for the procession. A WSN consists of three nodes is designed and implemented. Each node is built around 32-bit ARM core microcontroller, and equipped with an accelerometer to measure the pipeline vibration. The measurements of each sensor are collected wirelessly through ZigBee protocol to a base station. Results on a 2 m pipeline sample show the ability of the system to precisely detect damaging events e.g. knocking and drilling to the pipeline.Index Terms-WSN, structure health monitoring, MEMS, oil pipeline.
I. INTRODUCTIONSThe recent advances in the field of communication transceivers, microcontrollers, and Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) helped the emergence of a new type of wireless network for sensing and monitoring system called wireless sensors networks. These networks operate in an ad hoc manner, i.e. they do not require a preceding setup or a supporting infrastructure. They utilize new communications protocols built for small range network to cooperatively monitor and record measurements from phenomena of interest, then relay the recorded measurements to a base station. By using the wireless channel to communicate between the phenomena location and the base station, wireless sensor networks offer a reliable and simple scheme for deployment, control, and maintenance [1].Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) arrangements are in effect dynamically utilized in observing applications, for example, [2] who suggested a WSN for monitoring the environments including recorded data for any parameters such as lighting, gas, motion, and distance. a facility of interfacing of MATLAB with the Arduino microprocessor has exploiting to implement a flexible network. The data of each sensor is collected wirelessly exploiting the ZigBee protocol. In [3] a design for a wireless node with a vibration sensor is proposed for online monitoring of industrial machinery. The main focus is to design a wireless condition monitoring system to detect and diagnose the fault in mechanical transmissions systems (gears and bearings) using vibration signal analysis. The sensor node was used Size of Flash Memory 512 KB available to user for applications Size of SRAM 96 KB (two banks: 64 KB and 32 KB) Clock Speeds...