NeTS: Medium: Collaborative Research: Riding the Stress Wave: Integrated Monitoring, Communications, and Networking for Subsea Infrastructure

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Thousands of miles of pipelines crisscrossing the Gulf of Mexico seafloor are the veins for the offshore oil and gas industry in the U.S. and the world. Leaks and ruptures in those pipelines lead to not only enormous economic loss but also environmental disasters. The goal of this project is to effectively monitor the subsea infrastructure such as offshore pipelines, and efficiently deliver the sensed information for subsequent control and action. To provide a viable solution, this project will integrate piezoelectric transducer designs, acoustic communications, stress wave communications (SWC), and hybrid networking, and conduct experiments and field tests to validate the proposed designs. Such a vision needs efforts from both engineering and scientific perspectives, and the success of the proposed transformative research will significantly improve the design, analysis and implementation of subsea infrastructure monitoring and data transmission systems. The research outcomes will potentially contribute to a future subsea Internet of Things and ocean big data systems, and have impact on offshore oil and gas industry, pollution control, ocean agriculture, disaster rescue, etc. The project will also provide special interdisciplinary training opportunities for both graduate and undergraduate students, particularly women and minority students, across multiple institutions through both research work and related courses.This project aims to develop an effective subsea infrastructure health monitoring, and efficient information delivery network design via five synergistic thrusts: (1) structural health monitoring, which will employ Lead Zirconate Titanate (PZT) transducers to perform integrated structural health monitoring of pipelines, including impact, leakage, and damage detection, and explore how to send the detected damage information via SWC; (2) SWC channel modeling, which will conduct model analysis and simulation of SWC traveling along a fluid-filled pipeline in the subsea environment, and characterize SWC channels in a complicated pipeline network; (3) adaptive time reversal acoustic communications, which will characterize the acoustic communication channel in high frequency bands of 80-200 kilohertz for short range transmissions in the ocean and develop new adaptive communication receivers and strategies based on time reversal processing; (4) hybrid subsea network development, which will develop a hybrid subsea wireless network to integrate traditional acoustic communications and SWC depending on the subsea infrastructure, and study the hybrid network performance from multiple perspectives; (5) integrated experimental validation, which will conduct a series of lab and at-sea field tests on campus and at industrial/academic collaborators' sites to verify the proposed designs.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.