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To ensure pipelines' safety it is essential to have a regular and accurate monitoring system to inspect the behaviour of pipelines over time to prevent potential damage. This paper explores the capability of a millimetre-wave multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar system for micro-vibration monitoring of pipelines. Compared to the conventional radars, MIMO radar provides cross-range resolution, while still being capable of monitoring a scene with sub-second data acquisition intervals. This makes it a non-contact system suitable for fast displacement and vibration monitoring. However, the application of MIMO radars has not been fully investigated and analysed for structural monitoring, especially for pipeline vibrations. In this study, a dense time-series of MIMO radar data was collected and processed by proposing a framework based on persistent scatterer interferometry to obtain a map of pipeline vibrations. Experiments were conducted in a controlled environment consisting of both functional and inactive water pipelines. The results showed that the system could detect displacements from micrometre up to sub-millimetre levels, with a displacement error of less than 3 μm. Additionally, the radar could identify the dominant frequencies of 24.375 and 24.500 Hz even in pipelines with very small vibration patterns. These results validate the high potential of millimetre-wave MIMO radar systems for non-contact monitoring of micro-vibrations in pipelines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wellbeing of pipelines is influenced by a range of factors, such as internal and external pressures, as well as deterioration over time due to issues like erosion and corrosion. It is thus essential to establish a reliable monitoring system that can precisely examine pipeline behavior over time in order to prevent potential damages. To this end, pipelines are inspected based on internal and external approaches. Radar, as a non-contact sensing system, can be a suitable choice for external pipeline inspection. Radar is capable of the transmission and receiving of thousands of signals in a second, which reconstructs the displacement signal and is used for a vibration analysis. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging adds cross-range resolution to radar signals. However, a data acquisition rate of longer than several seconds makes it unsuitable for sub-second vibration monitoring. This study aims to address this limitation by presenting a method for high-resolution vibration monitoring using ground-based SAR (GBSAR) signals. To this end, a signal processing method by modifying the radar's signal model is presented, which allows for estimating scattering targets' vibration parameters and angle of arrival with high resolution. The proposed method is validated with numerical simulation and a real case study comprising water pipelines. Moreover, various analyses are presented for the in-depth evaluation of the method's performance in different situations. The results indicate that the proposed method can be effective in detecting pipeline vibration frequencies with micro-scale amplitudes while providing high spatial resolution for generating accurate vibration maps of pipelines. Also, the comparison with the radar observations shows a high degree of agreement between the frequency responses with the maximum error of 0.25 Hz in some rare instances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]