Applications of Wireless Sensor Networks in the Oil, Gas and Resources Industries

The paper provides a study on the use of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in refineries, petrochemicals, underwater development facilities, and oil and gas platforms. The work focuses on networks that monitor the production process, to either prevent or detect health and safety issues or to enhance production. WSN applications offer great opportunities for production optimization where the use of wired counterparts may prove to be prohibitive. They can be used to remotely monitor pipelines, natural gas leaks, corrosion, H2S, equipment condition, and real-time reservoir status. Data gathered by such devices enables new insights into plant operation and innovative solutions that aids the oil, gas and resources industries in improving platform safety, optimizing operations, preventing problems, tolerating errors, and reducing operating costs. In this paper, we survey a number of WSN applications in oil, gas and resources industry operations

Design and implementation of a wearable gas sensor network for oil and gas industry workers

Industrial environment usually involves some types of hazardous substances including toxic and/or flammable gases. Accidental gas leakage can cause potential dangers to a plant, its employees and surrounding neighborhoods. Around 64% of accidents that happen in the oil fields are due to combustibles and/or toxic gases. The safety plan of most industries includes measures to reduce risk to humans and plants by incorporating early-warning devices, such as gas detectors. Most existing tools for monitoring gases are stationary and incapable of accurately measuring individual exposures that depend on personal lifestyles and environment. This paper provides a design and implementation of a wearable gas sensor network by building sensor nodes with wireless communication modules which communicate their data along the network. The system is designed to be flexible, low cost, low maintenance and with accurate performance to detect toxic gases in a timely fashion to warn employees before an existence of a disaste

The Impact of Leverage on Earnings Per Share: A Study of Selected Petroleum Companies in India

The main purpose of this article is to study the impact of leverage on earning per share of selected petroleum companies in India.  The article also aims to examine the correlation between three types of leverage with earning per share and to know more about the leverage and petroleum industry in India. The most appropriate Parametric and Non parametric tests are employed and the analysis of data is presented through different graphs and tables. This article comes across to draw a comparison between the degree of combined leverage and earnings per share of selected petroleum companies during the study period

AN AUTONOMOUS MOBILE ROBOT FOR REFINERY INSPECTION

Industrial safety is one of the main aspects of industry specially refining industry. To avoid any types of unwanted phenomena all refining industry follows some basic precaution and phenomena. Communication is the main key factor for any industry today to monitor different parameters and take necessary actions accordingly to avoid any types of hazards.To implement a robotic system to autonomously navigate in an oil and gas refinery and it must be able to communicate with the control room and also localize it and alert workers in hazardous leakages and other accidents. Oil and gas refineries can be a dangerous environment for numerous reasons, including heat, gasses and humidity at the refinary. In order to augment how human operators interact with this environment, a mobile robotic platform is developed. This paper focuses on the use of WiFi for communicating with and localizing the robot. All the algorithms implemented are tested in real world scenarios with the robot developed and results are promising

Standards-based wireless sensor networks for power system condition monitoring

This paper assesses the industrial needs motivating interest in wireless monito ring within the power industry, and reviews applications of WSN technology for substation condition monitoring (Section 2). A key contribution is the identification of a set of technical requirements for substation - based WSNs, focused around security requi rements, robustness to RF noise, and other utility - specific concerns (Section 3). Section 4 comprehensively assesses the suitability of various IWSN protocols for substation environments, using these requirements. A case study implementation of one standar d, ISA100.11a, is reported in Section 5, along with deployment experience. The paper concludes by describing future research challenges for WSN protocols which are specific to this domain

Implementação de plataforma de automação por dispositivos móveis para gestão operacional em refinaria de petróleo/ Implementation of an automation platform with mobile devices for operational management in a petroleum refinery

Este artigo apresenta uma pesquisa da aplicação de plataforma de automação por dispositivos móveis objetivando otimizar o gerenciamento de rotinas e procedimentos operacionais de uma refinaria de petróleo, mais precisamente no setor de transferência e estocagem. A implementação da plataforma nesta prática se desenvolve em dois segmentos: rotinas operacionais e procedimentos de gestão. No primeiro caso, um breve mapeamento das rotinas operacionais é feito tal como os resultados são coletados e inseridos na plataforma. E no segundo, é apresentado um uso não convencional da plataforma para gestão de um procedimento de validação e acompanhamento de medidores automáticos, onde primeiramente é mapeado todo o fluxo de decisão considerando as etapas e os atores que o desempenham, até a análise dos resultados obtidos nos primeiros meses do emprego na refinaria. O trabalho envolve ainda o estudo da economicidade do monitoramento por meio de medidores automáticos e da viabilidade econômica de informatizar a tomada de decisão. Este estudo foi feito a partir de três cenários, analisando o comportamento dos custos variáveis, fixos e de não qualidade, baseado na confiabilidade do sistema. As técnicas de custeio utilizadas são de Custeio Direto e de Custeio por Atividade Orientado pelo Tempo (TDABC), encontrando ao final a redução de custos totais em até 79% a partir do cenário original. Os resultados obtidos comprovam o ganho de eficiência da aplicação da plataforma de automação em procedimentos complexos compostos por sequências de tomadas de decisão