Black Powder Flow Monitoring in Pipelines by Means of Multi-Hop LoRa Networks

The aim of this paper is to present a LoRa-based architecture to be used to monitor the formation of Black Powder (BP) in gas pipelines. The proposed network architecture is based on a multi-hop linear topology that allows to deploy a monitoring infrastructure that can be used to cover extremely long pipeline structures thanks to the wide transmission range of the LoRa technology. Together with the network architecture, a novel protocol based on nodes synchronization and very low duty-cycling is proposed, in order to reduce power consumption and then to ensure long life-time to the whole monitoring infrastructure. The network is expected to be used to detect BP flow in gas pipelines: for this application scenario, a measurement system based on electrostatic monitoring is presented. This system is integrated onto a sensor node composed of low power components, in order to reduce power consumption and then increase as much as possible the node life time.