Water pipe condition assessment using submersible quasi-distributed optical fibre based pressure transducers

Transient based technique is known as one of the most economical ways for pipeline condition assessment. This technique involves monitoring and analysing pressure transient profiles at multiple points in a distributed system. Its application is restricted due to its low spatial resolution (10 m). It is hypothesised that by increasing the number of pressure transducers and reducing the gauge length (distance between the transducers), the spatial resolution of the measurements would highly be improved. However, the deployment of pressure transducers is restricted to the location of the hydrants. In this paper, a submersible quasi-distributed optical fibre based pressure sensors were proposed, constructed and tested in laboratory to verify this concept. For this context, this paper describes the proposed optical device and presents some preliminary analysis and results obtained from a set of experiments. The experimental results show that using the quasi-distributed optical fibre based pressure transducers for pressure transient analysis can potentially detect small anomalies (200 mm) and measure the growth of the anomalies along a water pipe.