A condition monitoring system for high pressure natural gas transmission plant

The delivery of natural gas through the National Transmission System into the twelve regional systems and ultimately on to the consumer, requires a number of control functions to be performed. The major objectives when performing these functions can be broadly summarised as follows. System safety, integrity and security of supply. Minimisation of operating costs. Optimization of flow capacity and storage utilisation. Modern control technology coupled with the major advances in electronic microprocessor technology provided the basis for the development of schemes to overcome the current operational problems and thereby greatly improve the efficiency of control. The author briefly describes a microprocessor based control strategy which has been successfully implemented to overcome many of the operational problems and goes on to illustrate a strategy which provides a reliable condition monitoring system applicable to NTS offtakes. The ultimate condition monitoring system is embedded within the existing microprocessor based control structure in an attempt to avoid any possible degradation in terms of overall system reliability, which is always a major consideration in such applications