Electromagnetic pipeline coating communication for IoT condition monitoring of subsea O&G pipelines

A near real time situation awareness of an oil and gas (O&G) pipeline enhances the response time in case of failure and supports a digital twin. We present results from a project on a pipeline IoT based upon electromagnetic (EM) field multi hop communication in the pipeline coating. A transverse electro-magnetic (TEM) mode is excited in the coating via an inner semi-ring and an outer full-ring, where the example pipe supports frequencies from 1 MHz to 70 MHz with power loss below 2 dB/meter. A 50 mm long sacrificial anode adds losses from 2 dB at 50 MHz to 11 dB at 1 MHz. Measurements at 3.8 MHz on a 216 meters long pipeline gave an attenuation of 0.22 dB/m compared to simulated 0.35 dB/m, confirming the applicability of the simulations for designing the IoT solution. The results show the capabilities covering nodes beyond the neighbor of the EM transmitting node.