Temperature monitoring in subsea oil pipelines
Partner
Scope
The project is related to the development of a new generation steel tube umbilical that will give significant cost savings for the oil industry: An Integrated Production Umbilical (IPU) combining the normal function of an umbilical with that of a production or an injection flow line, also supplying high voltage power to potential subsea users.
Figure: Integrated Production Umbilical (IPU)
Suitable flow assurance is achieved through a combination of thermal insulation and active heating. In order to control the active heating system, FOS&S engineering team was involved in order to develop a fibre optic distributed temperature sensing system to monitor the temperature along the pipeline over long distances (up to 20 km). In order to regulate the heating of the IPU the temperature of the fluid is monitored using a special developed subsea sensing cable. The working principle of the sensing cable is based on the Fibre Bragg Grating (FBG) technology. The sensing cable can be used to monitor the temperature on discrete positions over the required length of the IPU.