PEER has published Report No. 2025/09, Sensing and Monitoring Technologies for Natural Gas and Pipeline Systems. The report was authored by Chien-Chih Wang, Sumeet Kumar Sinha, Peter Hubbard, Yong Liang, and Kenichi Soga of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Berkeley.
Access the report and 2 page summary. Access the full listing of PEER reports.
Abstract
This project aims to inform California infrastructure owners about rapidly growing state-of-the-art instrumentation and monitoring technologies that can be implemented to make natural gas infrastructure safer for both the environment and consumers. In the last two decades, the fields of electrical engineering and computer science have produced many new sensing technologies that can be applied to monitoring the health of natural gas infrastructure, such as leaks, local stresses, and movements. In addition, these technologies can improve prediction models by providing site-specific data such as soil properties, infrastructure loads, and soil movement. This information, coupled with the system's response, can help quantify the risk to natural gas infrastructure and the likelihood of loss of containment (LOC). This project aims to identify technologies that can inform risk models at the input, intermediate, and final output stages while providing a guide to state-of-the-art monitoring technologies that natural gas infrastructure owners can understand and implement quickly.