BYU Mechanical Engineering Students Design & Build Drone for Sinclair Oil
Sinclair Oil tasked a group of senior BYU mechanical engineering students to design and build a drone capable of inspecting above ground pipelines. The federal government requires oil companies to have sensor monitor stations for every 20 miles of pipeline and that the entire pipeline is visually inspected every 2 weeks.
Oil Companies in Need of Better Surveillance
The current solution to monitoring pipelines is to have a charted plane fly over a pipeline with an observer looking out the window. The observer looks for reflective areas (which indicate oil spills), changes in the surrounding area, and potential damage to the pipeline. If the observer sees anything, he marks the approximate coordinates and a ground crew needs to go out to take a closer look. The price for each charted flight is $2000. This adds up to about $52,000 a year to inspect a length of 20 miles of pipe.
Also, if any of their monitor stations detect a change in pressure or temperature in the pipeline, a ground crew has to go inspect the pipeline between monitoring stations to find out what’s going on. This means that they have to walk the entire 20 mile segment or have an unscheduled flight (which costs +$5,000) in order to find the problem area.
The major drawbacks to this solution are that it is very expensive, and a manned flyover can only find a rough location of a possible problem area. Implementing drones could save substantial costs by eliminating fuel costs, and also aid ground crews in more precisely finding problem areas because of their ability to fly at lower altitudes. Grant Smith, one of the students working on this project commented,
“Currently, there is no commercial drone specifically made for pipeline inspection. We’re building a drone designed to fly 40 miles (20 miles down the pipe, 20 miles back) that can take over the role of routine inspections as well as assisting ground crews with locating problems on the pipeline. We’re trying to keep the cost of the drone below $5,000,which would project a huge savings for Sinclair Oil in the future.”
Design Characteristics & Functions
Below is some basic design criteria for the VIPR Drone built by BYU:
- Design Weight: 10 lbs.
- Actual Weight: 11.5 lbs
- Wing Span: 9 feet
- Length: 6 feet
- Cruise Speed: 40 mph or 18 m/s
- Flight Time: 54 minutes with one battery, or 108 minutes with two batteries
The drone is capable of being flown by a GPS/Autopilot system or by a controller on the ground. It is equipped with a forward facing camera for the pilot and has an observational camera out of the bottom that will be used for visual and infrared inspection. While these two cameras are the main features of this drone, in the future other sensors could be mounted to the wing or in the fuselage for inspecting gas pipelines and other types of infrastructure.
Materials
The drone is made up of a variety of light materials. Balsa wood was used for the ribs within the wing. Carbon fiber spars connect all the ribs together to form a wing shell. The shell is filled with foam sections. A coat of fiberglass is applied to the outer surface of the foam wing to prevent the wing from wear and tear and also from impact in the event of a crash landing.
The fuselage, which houses the cameras, batteries, radio transmitter and other hardware, is made up of similar materials. A frame of carbon fiber supports is first constructed for the fuselage. From there, a CNC mill cut foam mold and fiberglass layups are used for the skins of the fuselage.
The tail, is two foam sections connected by carbon fiber supports for light aerodynamic flight.
Unique Innovation
Challenges that arise in engineering problems often give rise to innovation. I asked Grant if there were any instances where this was the case in the production of the VIPR Drone and he described the following experience:
“To keep all of our wiring inside the aircraft, we had to route our wires from through the inside of the wing and tailbooms. This required a specialty 3D printed part. We created an innovative way to clamp our fuselage to the wing.”
To better understand this innovation Grant provided me with the following image seen below.
Future Applications
Although the purpose of this drone was to inspect pipelines, there are many other applications that this drone could serve with slight modifications and changes. By adding atmospheric sensors to the wing, the identification and concentration of different gasses within the atmosphere can be analyzed. This could be especially useful if there were a leak in a natural gas pipeline.
Another application is that drones could be used to predict weather forecasts and track storms by adding temperature, pressure, and humidity sensors.
Cameras within drones have the ability to create topographical mapping by being able to map and create visual layouts over rugged terrain.
These are just some of many possible uses for drones that were related to me by Grant. Drones open up a new frontier of exploration because they are able to access areas of interest where human exploration is limited or restricted. The fact that drones have the capacity to make these unique discoveries makes them a fascinating field of study!
Special thanks to all images and videos provided by BYU ME Capstone Team VIPR, and also special thanks to Grant Smith for providing information about his capstone project.
About the Author
Brandon Hunsaker is a junior studying mechanical engineering. He hopes to use his degree to go into a field of cutting edge technology such as UAVs. Brandon is an electronics enthusiast who finds interest in anything that uses a motor from HO model trains to RC airplanes. These loves were instilled in Brandon by a loving and patient grandfather who regularly taught and mentored Brandon on electronics and home improvement projects throughout his childhood. Along with being fascinated by electronics Brandon also is obsessed with Legos and Major League Baseball.
