IoT Natural Gas Pipeline Monitoring System

In this paper, we discuss our construction of a natural gas monitoring system that utilizes a network of nodes that communicate with each other using LoRa modulation techniques. After the devastating gas leak in 2015 at the Aliso Canyon Natural Gas Storage Facility in Los Angeles county, in which a total of 104,400 tonnes of methane and ethane gas was released into the atmosphere, it became apparent that gas storage facilities and pipelines are in need of more efficient gas leak observation and monitoring methods. Our solution involves constructing nodes from a LoRa32 microcontroller, MQ-4 gas sensor, solar panel, and a 3.7V lithium battery. The nodes will be configured in a daisy-chain topology that can be positioned along any pipeline or gas storage facility. The daisy-chain topology will allow data to be sent along the chain to a data collection node and subsequently stored in the cloud hosted Firebase database. It is also anticipated that this monitoring system will be surveyed using an intuitive mobile application for iOS and Android devices.