GPS World, March 2016

WATCH MARKET UAV 2 A methane leak at a Southern California Gas SoCalGas storage facility has shone a spotlight on how unmanned aerial vehicles can be used to inspect utilities The mass ive three month leak temporarily plugged on Feb 12 chased thousands of Los Angeles residents from their homes At least 2 percent of natural gas is wasted through methane leaks at production sites according to the U S Department of Energy DOE UAVs are already being used for some electrical grid and pipeline inspections mostly in pilot programs but their potential for hands off long distance monitoring is just starting to be realized Along with criminal charges SoCalGas is facing regulatory mandates to improve air quality monitoring at its facilities Nationally the DOEs Advanced Research Project Agency Energy is funding a program to accurately locate and measure methane emissions associated with natural gas production The program has given one company Bridger Photonics a 2 million grant to develop a leak detector Bridger plans to build a mobile methane sensing system capable of surveying a 10 x 10 meter well platform in just over five minutes with precision that exceeds existing 40 GPS WORLD WWW GPSWORLD COM MARCH 2016 technologies used for largescale monitoring Bridgers detector useslaser beams to generate 3D images that show the distance and concentration of a gas leak even showing the types and concentration of the hydrocarbons Mounted on a UAV the sensor would give inspectors access to complicated or obscured infrastructures at processing plant s drilling rigs and pipelines The sensor could also be mounted on a vehicle Bridgers goal is for its devices to be able to service up to 85 sites and cost 1400 to 2220 a year to operate per wellsite Bridger plans to field test its technology this year and make it available commercially in 2017 Bridgers proposed leak detector uses lidar in combination with range and gas absorption measurements Illustration Bridger Photonics BRIDGERS IMAGER Bridgers gas imager is a point scanning lidar sensor that performs simultaneous range and gas absorption measurements according to Mike Thorpe chief technology officer of Bridger Photonics The measurements are combined to derive highaccuracy estimates of the gas concentration The measurement beam is scanned around the scene to create 3D topographic images of hard targets overlaid with 2D maps of the gas concentration The datasets will be georegistered using GPS and inertial measurements The prototype sensor will have the following performance specs 1 kpps measurement rate 3 100 m range 1 cm down range resolution 2 cm cross range resolution 3 ppm m methane detection sensitivity for distances 30 m 15 ppm m methane detection sensitivity for distances 100 m Bridger also is developing measurement approaches and algorithms to enable automatic leak detection and leak rate estimation Inspector Gadget Drones Could Solve Gas Leak Detection Issue