Without proper validation, even the most advanced technology can fail in the field. Validation standards ensure systems perform reliably, safely, and within regulations, reducing risks and preventing costly failures. For fiber optic sensing, validation ensures accurate detection and reliable performance with minimal false alarms.
In this article, we provide an overview of:
- The role of validation standards in ensuring technology reliability and safety.
- Key components and processes involved in technology qualification.
- General Fiber Optic Sensing (FOS) performance tests.
- Insights into Hifi’s High-Fidelity Distributed Sensing (HDS) technology and its validation approach.
The Role of Validation Standards in Technology Qualification
Definition and Purpose
Validation standards are documented procedures and criteria that technologies must satisfy to confirm they perform as intended. Essentially, they are vital metrics that assess new technologies, ensuring they meet predefined specifications and function correctly in their intended environments.
Ensuring Results
Proper validation enhances technological performance, accuracy, and reliability. By adhering to validation standards, potential failures can be identified and mitigated during the development phase, leading to more robust and dependable systems.
Regulatory Compliance and Market Readiness
Validation standards align technologies with industry regulations, facilitating smoother adoption and market entry. Compliance with these standards demonstrates a commitment to quality and safety, which is essential for regulatory approvals and customer trust.
The Business Impact of Poor Validation
Inadequate validation has real-world consequences. An improperly validated system can lead to significant financial losses, operational disruptions, and damage to reputation. For instance, deploying an insufficiently validated sensing technology may result in undetected system failures, leading to costly downtimes and safety hazards.
Components of the Technology Qualification Process
While validation ensures a system consistently meets performance criteria, qualification is the structured process of verifying that each stage of development—from design to performance—adheres to industry standards. Qualification forms a critical foundation for successful validation.
Design Qualification (DQ)
This phase ensures that the technology’s design meets all specified requirements. It involves reviewing design documents and drawings, outlining specifications, and verifying that the design is suitable for its intended purpose. In the fiber optic sensing world, this is a crucial step to ensure that the fundamental capabilities of the system are aligned with the monitoring needs of the operator. For example, specifying a telecom-fiber based FOS system with the expectation of effectively capturing low energy integrity events like pinhole leaks creates an obvious conflict given the well-known signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and noise floor limitations of these first-generation systems.
Installation Qualification (IQ)
IQ confirms that the technology is installed correctly and integrated into the operational environment as per design specifications. This stage includes verifying installation procedures and environmental conditions and ensuring all components are correctly configured. The importance of IQ in ensuring FOS system performance cannot be overstated; from leveraging industry best practices for conduit placement and fiber injection & splicing to working closely with client stakeholders across the integrity, operations, and IT (including cybersecurity) functions, effective integration of FOS hardware and software is crucial to extracting the full potential from this groundbreaking technology.
Operational Qualification (OQ)
OQ involves testing the technology under expected operational conditions to verify that it functions as intended. This phase includes stress testing, failure mode analysis, and ensuring the system operates within defined parameters. OQ begins with baselining, a dynamic process that allows the system – and its governing algorithms – to learn the difference between normal operating conditions and those events that may hold operational value (i.e. pig signatures or strain trends) or pose an integrity risk to the asset (i.e. leaks, ground disturbance, intrusion). Baselining verifies that the FOS system is operating as expected while simultaneously characterizing the operating environment to ready the system for accurate, timely capture of targeted events while minimizing false positives.
Performance Qualification (PQ)
PQ assesses the technology’s performance over time in real-world applications. It involves long-term testing to ensure consistent performance reliability and that the technology meets all operational requirements under actual conditions. PQ truly never ends. FOS systems are designed with the long-term nature of critical infrastructure in mind, so consideration must be given to the ongoing PQ processes and metrics required to ensure their continued performance over decades. Hifi has developed industry leading protocols in this regard, ranging from physical event simulations to quantify system performance for known event standards (i.e. simulated leaks under varied pressures and flow rates) to fully automated, ‘deep-fake’ digital event capabilities that allow operators to audit the system using virtual signatures anytime, anywhere at virtually no cost.
Ongoing Monitoring and Validation Updates
Continuous assessment ensures systems can adapt to changing conditions, technological advancements, and new regulations. Regular monitoring and periodic re-validation are steps that can assist in technology remaining compliant and performing optimally throughout its lifecycle. The baselining process referenced earlier continues for the life of the system. In addition to regular system performance and data quality checks, state-of-the-art FOS systems leverage automated push capabilities which allow operators to continuously update their artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) catalogue for new events. Hifi’s platform as a service model includes automatic system updates leveraging the full Hifi event catalogue – allowing the system to learn, adapt and evolve based on new events happening on any of Hifi’s 3,500+ km of monitored pipeline infrastructure.
Standards for Fiber Optic Sensing (FOS) Performance Testing
Fiber Optic Sensing (FOS) plays a critical role in high-fidelity monitoring applications, such as pipeline leak detection and structural health monitoring. Standardized performance testing ensures that FOS technologies provide accurate, reliable, and consistent data. Without standardized testing, inconsistencies can arise, leading to mischaracterization of events (false positives or missed true events being the most obvious examples), a false sense of asset condition/health, and compromised safety.
An Example of International Standards for FOS Performance Testing:
- ASTM Standards for Optical Fiber Sensors: These standards offer guidelines on calibration, environmental testing, and performance validation of optical fiber sensors, ensuring they meet industry-specific requirements.
Best Practices for Implementing Performance Testing:
- Consistency in Sensor Performance: Implementing standardized calibration procedures and regular maintenance schedules ensures that sensors perform consistently over time.
- Verifying Accuracy Under Real-World Conditions: Testing sensors in environments that closely mimic actual operating conditions helps validate their accuracy and reliability.
- Controlled Field Simulations: Running sensors through simulated real-world scenarios—such as pressure changes, vibrations, and temperature fluctuations—helps identify performance limits.
How Standardized Testing Benefits HDS Technology
Standardized testing provides an objective methodology by which the quantified performance of FOS systems (i.e. for events of defined nature, duration, magnitude, etc.) can be confirmed and compared. The ultimate goal here is to improve the accuracy and repeatability of event characterization towards increasing confidence in system outputs (notably a reduction in the occurrence of false positives and/or missed true positive detections). Standardization also builds trust among stakeholders and aids in regulatory acceptance of FOS-based solutions like Hifi’s HDS, as compliance with recognized standards demonstrates a commitment to quality and safety.
Hifi’s HDS Technology: A Case Study in Validation
Hifi’s High-Fidelity Distributed Sensing (HDS) technology offers advanced monitoring solutions for critical infrastructure with a focus on energy pipeline assets. Unlike traditional fiber optic systems, HDS leverages a fundamentally different fiber optic architecture designed specifically for sensing that provides orders of magnitude higher fidelity, enabling precise detection and characterization of events like leaks or structural changes.
Overview of Industry Terms
Before diving deeper, it’s important to define key industry terms related to fiber optic sensing technology (FOS):
- High-Fidelity Distributed Sensing (HDS): A next-generation fiber optic sensing system that offers high-resolution, low-noise data for real-time monitoring.
- First Generation Distributed Sensing: Also known as low-fidelity or legacy fiber optic sensing, first generation refers to Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) or Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS) systems that utilize telecommunications fiber to detect acoustic and thermal signatures along a pipeline. Due to the inherent SNR and noise floor limitations of telecom fiber, first gen systems are well known to struggle with high false positives and low selectivity.
- Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG): FBGs refer to wavelength-selective tunable features etched into the fiber core that can be leveraged to provide highly accurate strain, temperature, and acoustic data Hifi uses FBGs to dramatically increase SNR relative to backscatter-based fiber systems.
- False Positives vs. False Negatives: A false positive occurs when a system incorrectly identifies a random anomaly or routine event as a threat or event of interest, while a false negative occurs when an actual threat or event of interest goes undetected (also known as a missed true positive).
Challenges of Traditional Fiber Optic Sensing Methods
Conventional Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) systems often face limitations, including high false positive rates and missed true positive detections. These issues stem from lower sensitivity and resolution, making it challenging to accurately identify and locate events, especially in complex environments.
How HDS Differs from Legacy Fiber Optic Systems
Traditional fiber optic sensing systems rely on backscatter-based methods, such as DAS, which have inherent limitations in signal clarity, event localization, and selectivity. Some key differences between HDS and legacy fiber technology include the following:
- Superior Detection Accuracy – Eliminates signal noise for precise event identification.
- Minimal False Positives – Advanced processing ensures reliable differentiation of real threats from background noise.
- Enhanced Sensitivity – Detects even the smallest leaks and anomalies.
- High-Resolution Data – Provides detailed, real-time insights for accurate system monitoring.
HDS Validation Process:
The gold standard for evaluating fiber optic sensing systems is Validation Testing, which adheres to three key criteria:
- True Blind Testing – The system is tested without prior knowledge of when or where an event will occur, ensuring unbiased performance assessment.
- Third-Party Managed – Independent verification guarantees objectivity and prevents internal bias.
- Defined Success Metrics – Clear performance thresholds must be met for accuracy, sensitivity, and reliability.
This approach contrasts with Verification Testing, which lacks the true blind element and often allows technology providers to influence test conditions.
Third-Party Validation and Real-World Success Stories:
- Independent Studies Validating HDS Performance : Third-party evaluations based on the principles of true blind testing and defined performance levels have validated the effectiveness of Hifi’s HDS technology. In collaboration with industry partners, HDS has undergone rigorous testing to assess its leak detection capabilities. These studies have consistently shown that HDS outperforms traditional sensing methods.
- Case Studies of Customers Transitioning to HDS: Several clients have adopted Hifi’s HDS technology following rigorous qualification processes that often entailed comprehensive third party validation. For example, the Trans Mountain Expansion Project integrated HDS into its pipeline monitoring infrastructure following a multi-year assessment process that involved third party performance testing, in-situ piloting and extensive baselining/event simulation to provide the confidence necessary for its adoption as a primary monitoring solution for this asset. This deployment has been recognized as the world’s longest fully distributed fiber optic sensing installation on a multi-product liquids pipeline, highlighting HDS’s scalability and effectiveness in large-scale applications.
The Future of Validation Standards in Technology Qualification
Evolving Industry Standards and Best Practices
As technology advances, industries are continually updating validation protocols to accommodate emerging innovations. This evolution ensures that new technologies meet stringent safety and performance criteria, fostering greater trust and adoption across sectors.
The Role of AI and Machine Learning in Validation
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are revolutionizing validation processes by enabling more sophisticated data analysis and pattern recognition. In the context of HDS technology, AI and ML algorithms enhance the system’s ability to accurately detect and classify events, improving overall monitoring effectiveness.
Why Companies Must Prioritize High-Fidelity Technology Validation
Investing in robust validation processes for high-fidelity technologies like HDS offers long-term benefits, including risk reduction, improved efficiency, and simplified compliance with regulatory standards. Prioritizing such validation ensures that technologies perform reliably, safeguarding both assets and the environment.
Conclusion
Validation standards are fundamental in ensuring the reliability, safety, and compliance of advanced technologies. Hifi’s approach to validating its High-Fidelity Distributed Sensing (HDS) technology exemplifies the importance of rigorous testing and continuous monitoring.
Organizations seeking to enhance their infrastructure monitoring are encouraged to connect with Hifi to explore how validated HDS technology can meet their specific needs. Contact our team today to get started.