How is the application of 3-axis electronic compass in pipeline monitoring?

 The 3-axis electronic compass can help us to know the precise location of the pipeline.

In recent years, with the acceleration of urbanization, there are more and more underground pipe networks in cities, which brings with it frequent problems.This is because the pipeline is laid in a buried way. When the pipeline runs for a period of time, there are often some defects in the external anti-corrosion system, which causes the chemical corrosion and electrochemical corrosion of the pipeline, thus causing the pipeline corrosion perforation, stress corrosion cracking and other accidents.

Therefore, in order to ensure the safety of the pipeline and reduce the occurrence of accidents, it is necessary for us to monitor the pipeline to ensure the normal application of the pipelin

Pipeline monitoring requires monitoring of a lot of data, including monitoring of pipeline direction, deformation, corrosion, crack, pipeline environment and other key pipeline data.In the whole monitoring process, the precise positioning of the pipeline is a very important part, for example, when we detect deformation, corrosion and other problems, we need to know the specific position of the pipeline problem before the deformation, corrosion and other repairs.

The use of the 3-axis electronic compass can help us to know the precise location of the pipeline.

• The composition and working principle of 3-axis electronic compass

The 3-axis electronic compass consists of a 3-D reluctance sensor, a biaxial inclination sensor and an MCU, which can locate the direction and measure the inclination.

The three dimensional reluctance sensor is used to measure the earth's magnetic field. The inclination sensor compensates when the magnetometer is not horizontal. The MCU processes the signals from the magnetometer and inclination sensor as well as the data output and the soft and hard iron compensation

The geomagnetic field is a vector, and for a fixed location this vector can be decomposed into two components parallel to the local level and one component perpendicular to the local level.If the electronic compass is kept parallel to the local horizontal plane, then the three axes of the compass magnetometer correspond to these three components.

The three dimensional reluctance sensor uses three mutually perpendicular reluctance sensors, each axial sensor detects the strength of the geomagnetic field in that direction.

The forward direction is called the x-direction sensor to detect the vector value of the geomagnetic field in the x-direction;

Right - or Y-oriented sensors detect the vector value of the geomagnetic field in the Y direction;

The downward or z-direction sensor detects the vector value of the geomagnetic field in the z-direction

The sensor sensitivity in each direction has been adjusted to an optimal point according to the component vector of the geomagnetic field in that direction and has a very low transverse sensitivity.The analog output signal generated by the sensor is amplified and sent to MCU for processing. Combined with the dip Angle data measured by the biaxial dip Angle sensor, the error is reduced and the azimuth is finally determined.

3 axis electronic compass application in pipeline monitoring

As can be seen from the above, the 3-axis electronic compass can locate the direction and measure the inclination Angle, and can be used in pipeline monitoring.However, the 3-axis electronic compass is not directly used. In general, it will be used as a real-time pipeline trajectory detector.The pipeline trajectory detector consists of single chip microcomputer, electronic compass and rotary encoder, etc., which can detect the azimuth Angle, pitch Angle and distance between measuring points of the pipeline in real time, and reconstruct the pipeline trajectory in real time through software algorithm.

3D electronic compass used in pipeline