Predicting Oil and Gas Pipe Wall Thickness Using Machine Learning

Pipeline networks are crucial for process industries transportation and business operation. These vital elements, however, are highly exposed to material degradation due to corrosion that seriously impedes operational profitability, reliability, and safety. Industries usually monitor pipeline corrosion rate by gauging pipe wall thickness. Predicting pipe wall thickness helps industries to identify locations with high corrosion rate at an early stage and take necessary actions. The aim of this research is to predict pipe wall thickness at different locations using different machine learning algorithms including Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), fully connected Artificial Neural Network (ANN), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). The data processed and analyzed in this study included six different process variables as well as pipe wall thickness at three different locations in a downstream oil and gas industry. The study findings demonstrated that LSTM with test Root Mean Squared Errors (RMSEs) of 0.019 mm, 0.015 mm, and 0.017 mm for the three selected locations, outperformed the other methods applied and successfully identified the pipe wall thickness pattern.