Purpose and Applications

The safety of the gas transmission infrastructure is one of the main concerns for infrastructure operating companies. Common gas pipelines’ tightness control is tedious and time-consuming.

The development of new methods is highly desirable. Purway focuses on the applications of air-borne methods for inspections of natural gas pipelines. The main goal of this product is to let users use an unmanned aerial vehicle, equipped with a remote-sensing methane detector, for natural gas leak detection from the pipeline network. Many studies of developing laser detectors have been made on this product These studies include experiments mainly on the artificial methane sources simulating gas leaks. include the experiments on a real leakage of natural gas from a pipeline. the study includes at first monitored the artificial source of methane to determine conditions for further experiments. Then the experiments on the selected section of the natural gas pipelines were conducted. The measurement data, along with spatial coordinates, were

collected and analyzed using machine learning methods. The analysis enabled the identification of groups of spatially correlated regions which have increased methane concentrations. Investigations on the flight altitude's influence on the accuracy of measurements were also carried out. A range of between 10 m and 20 m was depicted as optimal for data collection in the natural gas pipeline inspections. However, the results from the field experiments showed that areas with increased methane concentrations are significantly more difficult to identify, though they are still noticeable.

The experiments also indicate that the lower altitudes of the UAV flights should be chosen. our results showed that UAV monitoring could be used as a tool for the preliminary selection of gas pipeline sections.