Articles & Papers

Offshore arctic conditions pose unique design challenges to the safe operation of subsea pipelines. The pipeline route may be exposed to seabed ice gouging and permafrost thaw settlement. If the pipeline route is located near the mouth of a river, it may become exposed due to seabed erosion from springtime river overflood draining through holes in the ice sheet (strudel scours) or river channel flows. In some areas, the seabed may have migrating bedforms or the pipeline may be subject to upheaval buckling. These arctic conditions can apply significant loads on a subsea pipeline or leave it exposed above the seabed to other applied loads.

The paper describes the possibility to map the evolution of the beat length in an optical fiber using stumlated Brillouin scattering and its application to distributed PMD measurements.

As fiber optic distributed scattering sensing systems are providing innovative solutions for the monitoring of large structures, the comparison of the different techniques and solutions is difficult because of the lack of standardized specifications and the difficulty associated to the characterization of such systems. The article presents a tentative definition of performance specifications and qualification procedures applicable to fiber optic distributed sensing systems aiming at providing clear guidelines for their design, specifications, qualification, application and selection.

The monitoring of temperature profiles over long distance by means of optical fibers represents a highly efficient way to perform leakage detection along pipelines, in dams, dykes, or tanks…