Improvement of Communication Distance for an Unconventional Channel

Nowadays, there is an increasing need to monitor infrastructures to ensure high safety and appropriate maintenance. Moreover, in the case of both water and gas distribution networks, the pipeline needs to be monitored. A particular example is the case of gas distribution, where there is a need to monitor the cathodic protection voltage to avoid damages to the supplier piping system. Unfortunately, much of this infrastructure is located in areas where creating a wireless communication network is very expensive. Therefore, it results to be necessary the use of alternative methods for the information communication. In water and gas monitoring systems, nodes are located near the pipes. In these cases, steel pipelines can be used as a communication channel, avoiding installing a dedicated data transmission infrastructure. Starting from the authors' experience with previous works, in this paper, a circulator circuit is proposed and characterized for data communication over pipes in gas systems. This work also shows the obtainable improvements using the pipeline as communication channel.