LivePIPE® II, Fotech’s best-in-class DAS pipeline monitoring, harnesses the power of fibre optic sensing to produce vast amounts of actionable data on events in real-time. Our cutting-edge distributed acoustic sensing system, powered by AI and edge computing, raises instant alerts on events including pipeline theft, leaks, third party interference and lost or stuck PIGS.
LivePIPE® II can be calibrated to your pipeline conditions and fully integrated with your security and UAV systems. Giving you peace of mind that your pipeline integrity is robustly monitored, 24 hours a day, every day.
As our use cases demonstrate, pipeline monitoring with LivePIPE® II is arming customers worldwide with the technology they need to gain instant visibility of their pipeline integrity. It plays a vital role in saving costs, protecting the environment, and safeguarding your company’s reputation.
LivePIPE® II warns you about all pipeline security, safety, and interference threats - instantly and simultaneously. Its pioneering AI technology alerts you to the location and nature of the event straight away, so that your response is fast, accurate and efficient.
Threats to oil and gas pipelines are becoming ever more sophisticated. LivePIPE® II is constantly evolving to provide the world’s most advanced, accurate real-time pipeline monitoring solution. It can pinpoint potential breaches within minutes and metres – as opposed to other legacy systems that deal in hours and hundreds of metres. It immediately informs you whether the pipeline integrity breach is:
Fotech is rewriting the standards for pipeline leak detection. All over the world, we are helping customers solve business-critical challenges - even in extreme temperatures, dense terrains, and remote locations such as deserts, forests, and mountains.
LivePIPE® II delivers a fully integrated and networked sensing solution, using advanced fibre optic distributed acoustic sensing (DAS).
Our DAS pipeline monitoring detects and locates leaks faster and more accurately than legacy systems, doing it simultaneously in multiple locations, end-to-end, across your network. It integrates with your own security systems too, for rapid response, often without any physical travel or on-site presence.
What’s more, LivePIPE® II can be calibrated to optimise range, sensitivity, and location, ensuring consistent and accurate pipeline integrity monitoring along the entire length of the pipeline. Our specialist experience in this area delivers more reliability, accuracy, and meaningful intelligence for our customers.
LivePIPE® II’s modules are fully integrated and networked to serve your pipeline security infrastructure, priorities, and scope. The modules can be configured with multiple Helios® DAS units and Panoptes® alarm handling servers for continuous monitoring of multiple sections of a pipeline.
LivePIPE® II’s modular system allows for rapid deployment and future expansion as your pipeline network grows.
By using a combination of modules to build your overall solution, we can tailor exactly the right pipeline integrity monitoring system to suit your needs. The three principal modules we use to build your unique solution are:
One, or more, Helios® DAS units plus a Panoptes® alarm management server, co-located in a rack.
Allowing the solution’s sensing range to be readily expanded along the length of the pipeline with multiple Helios® DAS networked together.
Contains a Panoptes® Alarm Management Server, which may be located away from the pipeline, for example at your central monitoring facility.
Fotech’s LivePIPE® II leak detection capability has been tested and proven through rigorous work in both the laboratory and the field.
SwRI (South West Research Institute) facility in Newfoundland tested 359 pipeline integrity scenarios where fluids were released with varying pressures from an actuated valve in a section of pipe buried in the soil box.
Oil pipeline leak detection was simulated with water, and gas leaks with nitrogen. Four cable designs were tested, some directly buried and some in conduits, located directly next to the pipeline and at distances offset from the pipeline by 1ft, 3ft and 5ft.
In every case, for every cable and every position, LivePIPE® II successfully detected the leak.
Additionally, and of immense importance to operators, we had zero false alarms.
Moving from the laboratory to the real world, in Turkey, a LivePIPE® II solution was installed on a fuel pipeline. While simulating a pipeline leak using water, a lance was pushed into the ground at an equal distance from the fibre sensing cable (see diagram).
Water is injected though a hole at the end of the lance at the relevant pressure and flowrate through a certain size hole and we verify the response of the LivePIPE® II solution.
After successfully passing 45 blind tests across nine locations, LivePIPE® II was commissioned to handle 34km of pipeline leak detection and monitoring. The operator used an operational pressure of 20bar and flowrate of 20lt/min with 4 different hole sizes. LivePIPE® II detected and raised alarms for all 45 leak tests, with zero false alarms.
The world’s first demonstration of gas pipeline leak detection was carried out in India. Again, LivePIPE® II hit 100% detection on the client’s tests and zero false alarms. This was achieved thanks to our expertise in calibrating the solution in the laboratory environment before fine-tuning it to the local environment in the field.
The retrieval of a stuck PIG often requires costly excavation and opening up the pipeline. Pinpointing the PIG’s location prior to digging saves significant time, expense, and disruption while protecting your pipeline integrity.
LivePIPE® II can detect the location of a PIG by recording the device’s audio vibrations and plotting the location on the map. The PIG can then be rapidly accessed for sensing, cleaning, or extraction without unnecessary damage.
LivePIPE® II can be integrated with other sensors, including CCTV, thermal cameras, or infrared sensors, for complete pipeline integrity protection. For the most effective response to a pipeline threat, LivePIPE® II offers full drone or UAV integration. When a threat is detected, a UAV can be automatically launched and flown to the location. There, it can identify further details about the threat, inform intruders that they have been detected, warn them away, or follow them.
With algorithms optimised for perimeter security, LivePIPE® II can also detect and provide the location of disturbances on fences around key assets along the pipeline route.
With total pipeline incidents down by 17% but still not close to zero, what other technologies can help achieve this target?
Find out how we tested our technology as a leak detection tool for pipeline and the results.
Find out how DAS can sync up with existing smart city projects and help meet the needs of citizens in growing cities.
What are the lessons existing urban areas can learn from a smart city designed from scratch?
During the pandemic, some countries experienced internet outages due to subsea cable faults. Find out how DAS technology can help detect and pinpoint anomalies faster.