Fiber Optic Sensing Association Presents 2021 Innovation and Project Award to HiFi

FIBER OPTIC SENSING ASSOCIATION (FOSA)

2021 MEMBER AWARD TO HIFI – PROJECT AWARD CATEGORY

Project Name:
Hifi & the Trans Mountain Expansion Project (TMEP)

Provide fiber optic sensing project/product information
Hifi high fidelity distributed sensing (HDS)


Timeline – Project/Product completion date and/or release date:
Project initiated in 2020; construction ongoing; projected completion 2022.


Other organizations that should be recognized:
Trans Mountain Pipeline ULC (Trans Mountain), Duraline, Corning,


Project Location:
TMEP (Canada) – Edmonton, Alberta to Burnaby, British Columbia


Project Description:
Trans Mountain is twinning its existing 1,200 KM long oil pipeline from Alberta to British Columbia, Canada (see map below).  The new pipeline being installed will have distributed fiber sensing architecture to monitor for leaks and integrity risks to the pipeline. The combined surveillance capability for both the existing and new pipeline will be the world’s longest fully distributed fiber optic sensing deployment.



Project innovation includes:

• employing custom designed clips to secure conduit and sensing fiber on top of the new pipe during construction;
• conduit / fiber redundancy engineering for hundreds of trenchless crossings as long as 2,000 meters including a 3,000 meter long tunnel;
• trenching conduit / fiber across 200 KM of an existing pipeline segment already twinned;
• a significant hybrid fiber network deployed for next generation Gigabit SCADA networking;
• fiber multiplexing of pipeline programmable logic controllers (PLC’s); and
• the provision of surplus bandwidth to support underserved rural and Indigenous communities with enhanced telecom services along the pipeline corridor.

Other innovations to support the project include:

• robust edge to cloud communication protocols that can switch between and adapt to high speed Gigabit network and high latency/low speed backup satellite networks;
• machine learning based leak detection algorithms specially designed for the project; and
• patented end-to-end pig detection / tracking / analysis, inclusive of moving status, speed, strain, and estimated time of arrival (see supporting images below).

Part of the project includes deployment of a high fidelity sensing fiber architecture during the construction period to support perimeter security during construction at five separate work camp environments.  This includes the innovation of multiple fiber sensing arrays to determine and differentiate ground based vs. fence-based security intrusions, as well as a customized application programming interface (API) to support automated pan/zoom/tilt (PZT) camera integration for security zone isolation.

As of the time of award application, 200 KM of fiber has been deployed along the pipeline with early success of the micro trench-based retrofitting along the existing pipeline.