Underground pipeline networks are the arteries and nerves of a city. Many pipelines laid in the 1980s and 1990s have been operating with defects for decades, with prominent corrosion and leakage risks. Pipeline renovation is not simply about replacing pipes. Building and management must go hand in hand, and intelligent monitoring is the core approach to safeguarding urban safety.
What Are Underground Pipeline Networks?
Underground pipeline networks are an important part of modern infrastructure. As the city’s “inner foundation,” they include water supply, drainage, gas, heating, power, communications, broadcasting, and industrial pipelines and ancillary facilities. They are critical infrastructure for urban operation and development and the city’s “lifeline” for public safety.
Challenges in Underground Pipeline Construction
As a urban lifeline system, underground pipelines are buried deep and spatially intertwined. Aging and defects in different pipeline types create differentiated safety risks, posing major challenges for urban renewal and pipeline renovation.
1. Unclear baseline: Due to incomplete records, some old pipelines have no drawings or coordinates, leaving hidden hazards unclear. In old urban areas, missing pipeline records and intertwined lines make excavation work prone to damaging existing pipelines. New-old pipeline connections and backfill settlement can also create new leakage risks.
2. Aging facilities: The proportion of old underground pipelines remains high, with “operating while defective” conditions and risks of leakage, pipe bursts, and urban flooding. For old gas pipelines, wall corrosion and seal failure can allow gas to accumulate in valve wells, pipe trenches, and other confined spaces. This is difficult to detect visually, and once the explosive limit is reached, a serious incident can occur.
3. Fragmented management: The “road zipper” phenomenon persists, with insufficient spatial coordination. Multiple pipeline types are buried in an intertwined manner without unified spatial management. Excavation can easily damage adjacent pipelines, amplifying cascading safety risks such as underground gas leakage.
4. Emphasis on construction over management: Digital perception coverage is insufficient, and safety resilience needs improvement. Many cities fall into the trap of prioritizing renovation completion rates over long-term safety control. Replacing pipes only solves hardware aging; it does not provide continuous perception and real-time gas monitoring and warning.
CCEsafety Underground Pipeline Safety Solution
Facing the era’s challenge of urban underground pipeline renewal, CCEsafety deeply participates in urban lifeline safety construction, focusing on full-cycle safety control for old gas pipeline renovation. CCEsafety has launched an “Air-Space-Ground” three-dimensional monitoring network to address industry shortcomings of “heavy construction, weak monitoring, and difficult O&M,” using robust gas monitoring products and intelligent municipal pipeline monitoring management solutions to install “sensory nerve endings” in underground pipelines.
The CCEsafety “Air-Space-Ground” integrated three-dimensional monitoring network combines laser detection, drone inspection, and ground sensors to safeguard the entire process from gas supply source to end-user gas consumption, building a solid urban safety barrier with technology.
Air: Gas Inspection Drone
Combined with a mobile inspection app, the drone can quickly detect methane concentration and improve inspection efficiency and accuracy. It provides intelligent, precise, and reliable inspection solutions for complex and hazardous environments such as stations and long-distance gas pipelines, comprehensively protecting personnel and equipment safety.
Space: Intelligent Pan-Tilt Laser Methane Telemetry Instrument
This is an integrated natural gas leakage monitoring tool combining explosion-proof monitoring and gas detection. It consists of an explosion-proof pan-tilt, video monitoring, and gas detection, offering advantages such as intelligent inspection monitoring, video-assisted positioning, strong environmental adaptability, and rich software functions.
Ground:
Buried leakage and vibration monitoring: Designed for all-weather detection and positioning of micro-leaks, geological disasters, and third-party destructive construction along pipeline networks. Installed in pile-mounted or ground-mounted configurations, it monitors methane concentration along gas pipelines in real time and provides vibration warning monitoring, effectively detecting pipeline damage caused by non-standard construction and unauthorized earthwork.
Laser gas leakage inspection vehicle: It can simultaneously detect methane and ethane content and display gas concentration (methane and ethane simultaneously), vehicle speed, wind speed, map, time, trajectory, and location in real time. Combined with GPS positioning, leak locations can be saved synchronously and inspection reports exported.
Various gas detectors and gas alarm controllers: Deployed in underground utility tunnels and along pipeline routes, they collect confined space environmental data 24 hours a day without interruption.
At the digital platform level, CCEsafety’s self-developed integrated gas intelligent monitoring management platform connects all monitoring terminals. Using NB-IoT and 4G networks, it transmits concentration data in real time, enabling large-screen visualization, online device management, tiered alarms, multi-channel warning push, and full-process hazard traceability. Once abnormal gas concentration is detected, the system immediately triggers a warning and pushes SMS, phone calls, and platform messages to safety responsible persons simultaneously, enabling early hazard identification and early response. The solution moves beyond the single evaluation metric of “renovation completion rate,” driving pipeline safety from passive emergency repair to proactive prevention and truly realizing intelligent municipal pipeline monitoring management.
Core Value of the Solution
1. Full-area perception, eliminating monitoring blind spots: Multi-dimensional collaborative monitoring from air, ground, and underground makes up for the insufficient coverage of traditional manual inspections and adapts to the intertwined and concealed characteristics of underground pipelines.
2. Real-time warning, shortening emergency response time: Automatic alarms for exceedances and synchronous push of alarm information to mobile devices enable immediate perception of leakage hazards, reducing the probability of gas explosion and poisoning accidents.
3. Data empowerment, solving the “construction over management” problem: Big data analysis enables risk prediction, shifting pipeline safety from “post-event repair” to “pre-event prevention” and addressing the digital control shortcomings after pipeline renovation.
4. Multi-dimensional linkage, improving urban lifeline resilience: The solution adapts to old gas pipeline renewal and integrated utility tunnel construction scenarios, effectively addressing pipeline safety risks caused by fragmented management and supporting long-term safe O&M of urban underground pipelines.
Pipeline renewal strengthens the city’s hardware foundation; intelligent monitoring gives the lifeline the ability to perceive risk. Amid the national wave of underground pipeline renovation, CCEsafety continues to deepen its work in gas safety monitoring, safeguarding urban underground pipelines with an integrated solution of hardware products and digital platforms, and continuously empowering urban lifeline safety projects.
