Design of remote data acquisition system for cathodic protection of oil and gas pipelines

Abstract

The buried metal pipeline has serious corrosion problems. However, the methods for evaluating cathodic protection in China are mostly manual inspection, which results in large errors in measurement data, incomplete data and inconvenient viewing. In this paper, a remote data acquisition system is proposed to evaluate cathodic protection of metal pipe. A high-precision acquisition circuit is designed, and the cathodic protection parameters of the buried oil pipeline are collected and sent back to the data server through the remote transmission mode of GPRS/CDMA. The current protection status of the protected pipeline can be obtained via analyzing and processing the data in the server, which provides an important basis for the protection of the pipeline. Moreover, a dedicated power management module has been designed and an ultra-low power processor MSP430F5438 is selected as the main control chip in this module, so that the system current is less than 20 μA in sleep mode. The system can work continuously for more than 10 years via a cooperative power supply between the 12 000 mAh battery and solar cell, which makes up for the lack of power supply in the field.

Keywords

• pipeline corrosion
• cathodic protection; remote data acquisition
• ultra-low power consumption