Analysing petroleum leakage from ground penetrating radar signal

Abstract

The current evolution of technologies and rapid development has influenced the pipeline construction all over the world. However, this development can be a risk to the surrounding environment, for example pipeline leakage. There are numerous incidents that caused by pipeline leakage, which includes petroleum pipeline leakage. The petroleum pipeline leakage is one of the very serious situations that can lead to the explosion and the worst it can cause disaster to the nearby area and loss of life. There are numerous methods that are used to detect underground pipeline leaks. One of the methods is Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR). This study investigates the petroleum leakage and its impact to the surrounding soil. The objectives of this study are to determine the physical properties of the contaminated soil and to evaluate the numerical analysis of the electromagnetic wave for petroleum leakage diffusion in sand. The prototype of leakage model has been built for simulating observation. The data have been collected for every hour for 16 h to monitor the petroleum leakage diffusion. The software used to process and extract GPR data is Reflex 2DQuick. Furthermore, the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) method was used for the simulation of the petroleum leakage diffusion by simulating the electromagnetic waves penetrating through different materials. GPR signal modelling and numerical analysis were done in MATGPR software. The result of this study indicates the changes of dielectric constant of sand from 3 to 5.3 when the sand is mixed with petroleum. The increase in dielectric properties of sand is due to its ability to store the electrical energy. Moreover, the result of GPR signal modelling proves that the content of petroleum has disturbed the signal attenuation which is transmitted by the antenna.