Information Fusion and Data Augmentation for Risk-based Maintenance Optimization of Hydrogen Gas Pipelines

Demand for energy is increasing every year and hydrogen is being seen as a good alternative to conventional natural gas. The current focus is on the use of existing pipeline infrastructure for the transport of hydrogen gas, and it is necessary for us to ensure the safe and efficient operation of the pipeline infrastructure given the risks posed by hydrogen. Pipeline integrity management is critical for hydrogen transport and there are knowledge gaps for the impact of hydrogen on the pipeline integrity and operational considerations, thus hindering the pipeline operators from adopting hydrogen into their networks. To realize the concept of transporting hydrogen through existing pipeline systems, it is necessary to have reliable risk assessment and maintenance optimization frameworks in place. A Bayesian network methodology is proposed to fuse information from multiple sources obtained by multimodality diagnosis of pipe materials and Bayesian updating will be incorporated to reduce the uncertainty arising from different random variables. Risk assessment of the pipeline systems will be carried out based on the posterior distributions of the random variables. Given the predicted risk level, we then propose a risk-based maintenance optimization framework to minimize the maintenance costs while ensuring the safe operation of the pipeline systems.