FUTMinna Professor invents pipeline, railway monitoring detector

Oluwafemi Olugboji, a professor at the Federal University of Technology Minna (FUTMinna) has invented a system that can monitor pipeline damage across the country.

Professor Oluwafemi Olugboji from the Department of Mechanical Engineering of FUTMinna stated in the university’s 95th lecture series that the pipeline monitoring device can locate and characterize events along the pipeline in real-time

According to the professor, the monitoring device can immediately warn of hazards, such as pipeline explosions or drilling, natural leakage or corrosion, or any related issues that may cause harm to the environment.

“Pipeline can be damaged either through natural form such as corrosion, earthquake or activities of heavy duty equipment passing through or third party activities such as vandalization, use of expolosives, drilling device, or cutting device etc.

“I’m 100percent optimistic the device we developed can be mounted on the Gas pipeline from any location to be monitored by the authorities concerned”.

“We made use of 2 different techniques in creating the device, digital filtering used for decomposition filter and linear filter for the detection of signals.

“Then the revers technique or the inverse method used for giving a precise location in real-time based on the information available whenever there’s a strike or any attack or damage on the pipeline, it works backward to give out information in real-time”, he stated.

This technique, according to him, “is applicable not only on Gas or petroleum pipelines but in places where you monitored systems that have to do with communicating from one end to another end like the rail transportation”.