Development of Fiber Optic Accelerometer for Third-Party Damage Detection

Recently, a number of underground pipelines have been drastically increased. The integrity of these buried pipelines, especially gas transmitting pipelines, is of importance due to an explosive characteristic of natural gas. The third party damage is known as one of the most critical factor which causes fatal accidents. For this reason, a number of systems detecting third party damage are under development. The major concern in the development of third party damage detection system is to transmit vibration signals out of accelerometer to signal conditioner and data acquisition system without any interference caused by noise. The objective of this paper is to develope a fiber optic accelerometer applicable to third party damage detection system. A fiber optic accelerometer was developed by use of combining principles of one degree of freedom vibration model and an extrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometer. The developed fiber optic accelerometer was designed to perform with a sensitivity of 0.06mVg, a frequency range of less than 6kHz and an amplitude range of -200g to 200g. The developed, accelerometer was compared with a piezoelectric accelerometer and calibrated. In order to verify the developed accelerometer, the field experiment was performed. From the field experiment, vibration signals and the location of impact were successfully detected. The developed accelerometer is expected to be used for the third party damage detection system which requires long distance transmission of signals.