Methane Gas Detection: Streamlining with a Drone

Hello, everyone. And thank you for joining our MicroDrones Wednesday webinar learn how to streamline your methane gas detection with the drone. I've read for Derf, Microdrones' marketing director, and we're glad that you taking some time to learn more about drone based methane gas detection. Here are the main topics that we'll cover today. The challenges of drone based and how to overcome them. How the m detector one thousand c h four improves workflow, reduces field and inspection time, We'll review documentation, safety compliance, workflow, and look at a heat map. Now, I'd like to introduce our panelists. For Microdrones, we have Chuck Dorgen, director of sales for the Americas, who has extensive sales experience, specifically in drones and sales operations. Chuck brings a wealth of knowledge to the company having spent more than sixteen years in management positions at United Technologies Corporation in nearly seven years at Xerox. Juk earned his MBA from Lemoyne College. Today, we had Raven Air with us, who is a drone, oil, and gas industry contractor, and service providers specializing in UAV, methane, gas detection, inspection, thermal imaging, and monitoring. From Raven Air is Mark Sakash, your operations manager since February of two thousand eighteen. Marks a seasoned professional with over thirty years of experience in the oil and gas construction business, twenty of which, opened in the natural gas industry and fifteen as a project manager. Mark's overseeing inspectors and contractors in the construction or maintenance of hundreds of miles of steel pipeline regulator upgrades, integrity management projects, including corrosion testing, and hydro testing, all while having no OSHA recordable incidents. The chief pilot at Raven Air is David Rock, a UAS expert with a strong mechanical background, years of flying experience, and many additional qualifications. He has attained certifications, including his FAA certified remote pilot with SUAS enforcement, and over one thousand RC hours with three hundred log flying hours on drones. Before we start, I'd like to note that we also look forward to your questions, comments, and feedback. Please enter them into the go to webinar window on the right. If we don't get to your questions at the end, we'll follow-up after the webinar. And now, I'd like to turn things over to our director of sales Shuck Dorgin to begin our show. Welcome, Chuck. Excellent. Thank you very much, Brett. Appreciate the invite today. This is a very exciting topic we have. I'll just go over the agenda real quick here. We've done the quick introductions. We're gonna next turn it over to Raven Air for a quick slideshow. Then it'll come back to me, and I'll I'll do some background on Microdrones. I'll talk more about the methane gas detection system in the MB Tector, and then we'll open it up for questions at the end. And like my like Brad Brett said, if we don't have if we don't get your question, we'll we'll respond in an email at a later time. So, well, further ado. I'll give it a I'll turn it over to Mark Say Cash and David Rock from Raven Air. Thanks, Jeff. Appreciate it. My name is Mark Sakesh with Raven Air. We are a Pennsylvania based drone services company. We our company history is was founded. True Tech drilling was founded in two thousand. We're a family run business. We specialize in the horizontal directional drilling, the natural gas industry. We have approximately ten rigs out, and we bore service to from service lines to twenty inch pipe up to seventeen hundred feet. Ravin Air was founded because the owners felt there was a need in the utility business and in the infrastructure business for remote data collection. We thought that this would be a niche to gather this information for our existing customer base and it expands the existing business. My name is Mark Sajakesh. I'm the operations director. I have more than twenty five years experience in the gas industry. They certified corrosion technologists along with coatings and an API eleven sixty nine certified for pipelines actually. Dave Rock is our pilot.FA certified remote pilot with the SUAS endorsement, a thousand hours RC, flying three hundred logged on drones. And we're a member of the CRPAA certified remote pilots association of America. So, basically, our MD four one thousand, this is our aircraft with the gas detection payload attached. And I'm gonna hand it off to Dave to talk about the flight mission planning and the in flight screen shots. Alright. So my name's Dave Brock. Like Mark said, I have over a thousand hours in on RC's, and I've been flying since I was a teenager. I just got into drones about plus five, maybe six years ago. And recently, just started commercial work with a drone. With Raven Air. So as he said, we use the MD for one thousand airframe with the m detector sensor package. Basically, We go through on the flight plan in the empty cockpit, and we just point and click. It's pretty simple. You'd touch the screen, draw a perimeter, and you can fine tune your flight path as to your hatch angle depending on how fast you wanna fly this mission and then and stuff like that. Basically, as the drone is running on on the left, you can see the flight path programming. And then on the right, you can see an actual in shot or an in flight shot of the drone running. With the indicators on the screen. So The next slide, we have the c and d Tech, the MD lidar CH four consists of the program gas mounted detector, integrated with the Microrones drone has onboard HD video link, which means that we can see in real time what's going on on the ground to better line up the data with the video. The reason why we use this is it goes where people can't or shouldn't go where it's not safe for people on the ground. Whether it be on a river red near steep cliff. The drone's pretty robust. It's easy to to operate. It can run into dirty and dangerous environments. That you don't want to traditionally send your foot crews in on. It's proven. It's rated for aircraft rating. So it's a pretty stable airframe and it gets the job done. It's a very reliable drone. So we use it on natural gas line surveys, tank inspections, gas well testing, And we can use it for plant safety if you wanna do a scan over your plant. We can do that. So some of the benefits of it are it's it's low cost compared to traditional gas detection methods. It's very, very sensitive from one PPM all the way up to fifty thousand PPMs, which is five percent LDL. It's lightweight, easy to transport, It's easy to deploy. Takes up in the air in about, oh, five to ten minutes. What we're what we're gonna show you next is an in flight video This is one of the benefits of using this system, is that you can actually see this is broadcast back to our van. Or back to the screen that's provided by micro drones. The actual flight path that the drone takes while it's making it scan. So you can you can see on the ground any indicators of dead vegetation or anything like that. Right there, as a live view, it's it's one of the great aspects of this system. The customer really likes that because if they have an engineer along with us, they can they can make a mental note of wearing the flight that that indicator was. Some of the outputs that the MD Android app provides our real time monitoring of the flight. It'll give us right hand corner of the screen there under the sensor package, it will actually give us a methane column density reading in parts per million times meter. It'll give us the sensor status, which is okay or if it's out of range of the ground or it's not getting into good reading, it'll tell us that. It'll plot the LMM readings. So you see each dot on the screen as it goes through. And it'll give us a different color depending on the the setting that the customer requests. So far as an indicator, It the MB Tractor Android app allows you to graphically visualize and and present all the exported data on one convenient map. It's right there. All of it's right there on the screen for you to look at. The data also includes the GPS position or the GNS position of the drone at the time of the reading. We can import a TFD from MD four one thousand. We can quickly export the data to a CSV for exploitation in the GIS software, which that means we can take that data and and spit out a CSV file, and we can make a map on Google Earth and it overlays on to Google Earth, and you can you can basically follow it right there on Google Earth. So the data is displayed by color, which, like I said, you can set that parameter depending on what your customer wants, when the alarm is going off or what level of PPM, And then we also have an HD file through the camera that's mounted on this sensor for record keeping. Yeah. Thanks, Dave. Really appreciate that. So this is an example of the CSV file. It shows you latitude and longitude and the altitude above sea level, your density reading in parts per million and the status of the sensor at the time of the read. And what you find is is you go down through. You'll have it's quite familiar, and all the statuses were okay in this flight. But you'll come along and You'll have there's a four hundred and seventy p p m reed. Well, the factory specifications are set. The two alarms are set at zero to two fifty would be a clear or non colored indication. From two fifty parts per million to four fifty parts per million would be a yellow and from four fifteen above, it would be a red indication, and we'll show you that on the next slide. This right here is a flight data that ends up getting uploaded to Google Earth in the KMC file that's made out of the CSV. Basically, as you can see, you have a white indication that shows a good read, blow two fifty. You have yellow or or just looking color on this is a two fifty, four fifty, and then you have the red. So this is an actual flight that we did for a local gas company, and there were some indications of methane that they went out later and they qualified. The next slide would be we this is actually us out on them right away. This is how we set up It's a start of flight. We have a landing pad, of course, we cone the area off. This is the actual flight itself, and we're running it approximately seventy five feet. The right away was marked, so we had an idea of where the pipeline was. So we fly down the center line. That's the same shot showing the drone, run it over the go up the right away. It's probably We had heavy indications of methane across this field. It was a the gas company was rather impressed and It's increased our workload ten folks. So that's it. It's we're right with air. Well, thank you very much for your presentation. It was great to learn how you use the m detector one thousand c h four. Now, to learn a little bit more about microdrones and the m detector itself, I'd like to turn this portion of their presentation over to Chuck Dorgan. Chuck? Thank you, Brett. Thank you, Mark, and Dave. That was excellent. Let me give you a little background about Micro Jones. Micah Jones introduced the first commercial quadcopter back in two thousand five, so we're not one of these new drone companies on the market. We've been around for quite some time. Shortly after introducing that MD four two hundred, we introduced the MD four one thousand in two thousand nine. The m p four one thousand is Micro Jones flagship drone. Use has up to seven different payloads. You can interchange with it. Micodrone's is not just a drone manufacturer. We're a full solutions provider. That is, we manufacture drones We integrate payloads. We wrap that solution with softwares to manage the workflow and provide you a full integrated solution. So, it's not just a drone manufacturer, we're a full solutions provider turnkey. Before I get into the the the nuts and bolts of the m detector c h four, I wanted to kinda go over something here just to kind of give people ground people on our lineup. We basically have two series that we offer these solutions. We have the MDMapper and the MD detector series. The MD mapper includes not just photogrammetry, but also our lidar series, It actually has its own name called MD lighter, but for all intents and purposes, it's a mapping series. Within there, we have the MDMapper one thousand plus. MD mapper one thousand p p k, MD mapper one thousand d g, which stands for direct geo referencing. And then we also offer three different sensors under two different airframes for lidar. Our empty lidar one thousand. MD lidar three thousand at our MD Lider three thousand d l, which is the new regal mini box downward looking sensor that was introduced in two thousand eighteen. The other series, which is what we're focusing on today, is the Emtekter series. It's a a a line that's been designed for inspection tasks. The first solution to be released on on the the MB Tector series is the MB Tector one thousand c h four, which was introduced approximately two years ago. The c h four detection is is it gives you the ability to detect methane gas remotely. My thin gas is present in lots of different things like natural gas lines and and tanks, industrial tanks, and wells. It's excellent sir excellent for reducing work time and safety. So, for example, a a client purchase m detector one thousand c h four could also add a mapping payload, for example, the standard or the d g or even a live are. So a lot of our customers don't just own one payload with their with their drone. They own several. So who should consider the m detector one thousand c h four? It's professional companies, obviously, with with methane any kind of actual gas. Like I said before, methane gas is is present in most kinds of gases. But examples are natural gas line surveys. Tank inspections, gas weld testing, landfill admissions monitoring, and plant safety. And even though I have plant safety at the bottom, it's probably, you know, the highest priority is safety as everyone knows on this call that safety takes priority on everything. So m d tector one thousand c h four, again, kind of, you know, I've mentioned what that we provide solutions So what is the solution here? We got hardware and software. We actually have the methane sensor, which hangs below the drone. We have what's called the LMM integration module. LMM is is the series from program. We've integrated our drone and, you know, cameras with their sensor so it could seamlessly communicate with our drone. And our software for first one being MD cockpit app. And then we have a a post flight app called MDTector viewer app, which gives you a heat map of what you've just done. And we'll I'll show you all this stuff in a few minutes. So what's included in the m detector c h four as far as the hardware, of course, it's the m b four one thousand airframe. Data acquisition payload is the program l m m gen two sensor, which you see there right to to the right. The Micro Jones LMM integration module, which is further to the bottom right there, it includes the mount that integrates with the sensor. We essentially took the LMM handheld unit replace the battery with our our module, so you don't have to have the battery for the sensor, the the drone will power it. We've also included h high definition first person view visible camera so you can see where the sensor is pointing on the ground. And we also stabilize all this with an eight year mount supporting the sensor. This whole system also comes with a HD video link for viewing what the sensor is looking at in real time. As far as the m detector c h four software, the the two things are included with this package is the m d cockpit Android app. Which gives you live data view, feedback functions so you can monitor the the flight in real time. As far as altitude, speed of the drone, you actually get readings, and I'll get into that in a little bit. And also the Emtek or viewer app, which is an Android app well, you can have on your on your tablet. It graphically represents the the like, a heat map of what you just did. And it's as soon as the drone Lans, you can be able to download that data and show your customer live in the field. I'll get into some specifications of this sensor. It it does detect c h four, as I had mentioned before, and c h four is is present in all sorts of things. Including natural gas. The range is one thou is one to fifty thousand parts per million times meter, and I'm gonna explain what that that calculation is in more little detail on that. Data collection, it has two different data collections. One is two samples per second, which is onboard the drone that is used for the MBViewer app afterwards. The sets are actually will collect as as many it runs at ten hertz, so it's collecting ten samples per second And that date is also available for some of our customers that require that information in a a CSV file. The operating distance for this is one and a half feet to a hundred feet. Obviously, the closer to the the point of interest, the better you're it's gonna be at a hundred feet. It could it it might not give you as much readings, but it can operate at a hundred feet. Operating temperatures for the sensor is one degree Fahrenheit to a hundred and twenty two degrees Fahrenheit. The late the laser itself has two lasers. There's one for the actual reading, and then the second one is just a visual The first one, the guide light is a class three r, and then the measurement lights, class one. So both of them are safe. And there's dimensions and weight. Some of the things that Micro Jones has done with the sensor, it it was originally brought to market as a handheld in and Micro Jones took this handheld device, removed the battery, removed the data, the collection board, and integrated it with our system. To make it seamless from planning to execution data collections to presenting to the customer. Getting into what the parts per million times meter calculation that I mentioned on slide before, The Dell MM is based on infrared absorption spectroscopy. The laser light is spectral range one point six five is emitted from the from the LMM. The laser light is reflected and captured, so needs to have a reflection, meaning it has to come back to the sensor. And it does the calculation based on when it sent out and when it comes back. And it does this calculation within the sensor of parts per million time meter. There's an example there that shows And what it helps you do is gives you a little bit more consistency on your reading. So you have one gas leak here in the upper right hand corner there. And you have two different times, like, if as the drone is flying across this. So for example, Obviously, if you're hitting it right at the opening of the leak, you see there's ten thousand parts per millionaire. It's it's very intense. Opposed to the farther left there, it says a hundred parts per million. How you get your consistency is it's it's measuring column density. So it's measuring the the the thickness of the plume. And in the left hand example, that plume is one meter thick. Where if you see to the right, it's it's one centimeter thick. So using that calculation, a hundred parts per million times one meter gives you a PPM times meter of a hundred. An example to the right one thousand or I'm sorry, ten thousand parts per million, times one centimeter, gives you a hundred parts per million times meter. So it gives you a consistent reading of of how big the leak is, whether you hit the sensor the sensor hits it right at the leak or if you're catching a downwind, it'll give you a more consistent reading. The advantages of the LOM is a kind of obvious, but it's fast response and high sensitivity the detection at a distance up to a hundred feet. It has excellent selectivity for methane gas. Very lightweight. And another key thing is it has a self check during startup, so it doesn't have any calibration requirements. It does that every time the the device is powered up. The LMM integration module components, you can see them there on the right. It comes with an eighty year mount. So it keeps the sensor pointing down at all times. Also, that mount has vibration, isolation. The module for integration to the MD four one thousand has an interface for the FNC to record the sensor data, which goes onto an SD card. It also includes GNSS positioning for all the readings. It also provides power from the the one thousand drone provides power for the sensor itself, which reduces the the weight of the payload. And then also, we've added the f p v camera, which you all see on the ground from the camera, the comms video comms. Here's a screenshot of our MD cockpit Android app. You use the Android app for not just planning the missions, but you also use it for monitoring as you're flying. If you notice the bubbles, there's a, b, and c over there on the right. A is gonna give you an actual live reading. So as that drone's flying and as it's it's it's taking readings, you'll see that number changing every second. So eleven right in this example here, eleven is is essentially nothing. As I said before, nothing, yes, is present president just about everything. So eleven is is basically nothing. The bubble the the b is pointing to it says clear. I believe what that means is there's three different thresholds you can set. I'm gonna show it in the next screen. You can set your thresholds for what what levels of parts per million times metered are concerning from clear being, it's no concern. Yellow is some concern, and then a red bubble is set to this is where I want my customer wants to be able to see that. And I'll I'll get into the the the colored bubbles and how that's set on an anemic screen. And NC just plots it just shows you the the drone itself the blue circle with the white x, and it's gonna show you the plots as it's flying the mission. So here's an actual example. Of actually after you've landed the drone, this is the m detector viewer app. So after the drone lands, you can download the data to it using the TFD file. Here, you can see the it's an example for whatever reason shows up in the PowerPoint presentation. I don't know. Orange, we call red. But you see there's clear there's it's very hard to see, but there's there's little black faint circles in there, black circles. Those are readings that are lower than whatever you set the threshold. So in this example here, calling the transparent. It's zero to two hundred parts per meter by two hundred I'm sorry. Two hundred parts per million times meter. The next level, which is yellow, is set at two hundred to five hundred PPM times meter. And then the threshold where we In this example, we were concerned or the customer was concerned and wanted to know these numbers was five hundred to fifty thousand. And those are the ones that that look orange. We call Brad but it's overlaid on Google Google Maps. And this is something you can do seconds after you land. So when you're sitting there in front of your customer, or some kind of inspector or safety coordinator, you and you you're out in the field and live. You don't have to go back to the office and do all this post processing. You can pull the data off the drone immediately and put it in your tablet and show it and display it on your MB viewer app. This is very powerful being able to turn that around that quickly. So the workflow, basically, it's it's very simple. You have the drone at the top. On the left is during flight, you have just telemetry. And the MD cockpit app is is very powerful software that comes from Micro Jones. It's been developed by Micro Jones. It doesn't just you don't just use this software to plan your mission. You also use it for monitoring the mission while it's in flight. And as I I kind of went over be a couple slides ago, he gives you live feedback while the drone's in flight of what where it's at, what it's doing, how fast it's going, all that important information you need to know, and also giving you live readings of what the sensor itself is is seeing at the at the time it live. So you you almost can already find out before you even download the data where your trouble areas are. So to the right, you download the TFD file from the drone, and you load it into the MB viewer app. And this is kinda what you're gonna see. You're gonna see this little heat map here. It's gonna show you where the drone went, and what areas did it pick up gas leaks. So, the advantages of this integration to the LMM is the data is recorded on the drone itself. So there's no external data recorder. We removed that in this. By doing that, we saved a ton of weight. We've also simplified the operation operational workflow. The sensor is powered by the drone, as I mentioned before, also reduces the weight, and he also getting a live feedback on the Andy cockpit app. Real time telling you the readings that you're seeing. So why consider it? Well, this this package identifies possible faulty or aged seals and connectors by detecting gas leaks. Improves and standardizes maintenance services, it provides proof of inspection and conformity. I I could personally tell you from the the couple years I've been working with this product line, that it's surprising the leaks that you can find with this sensor that traditional methods weren't finding. Fairly large leaks has been the feedback almost always. And it's I guess, when you think about it, it's not so surprising when you have, for an example, inspectors or or or field folks walking these pipelines, it's always an area where you really it's not easy to walk or drive a UTV or ATV through, where you find these leaks, So in traditional methods, a section of pipeline is marked, has been inspected. And you bring on the m detector one thousand c h four series, and you find substantial leaks that have been there for for many years, and just were not found using traditional methods. So this this does a a great job in it and when it providing the proof of inspection also. It's a rapid deployment. It's very easy to do. So if you have any issues or, you know, a natural disaster or any kind of thing like that or an earthquake and you wanna go out and and check the the pipelines, this is very quick and easy to get into the field. So it reduces your time spent in the field, and also, like I said, it's it's it's much better than traditional ground only inspections. The advantages are, you know, saves money, obviously, on on for both parties, improves safety by reducing workers' exposure to fire toxins. Also, just, you know, being out in the elements of of having to walk very tough terrain. It's really been where it's shown its value is in these areas. And in these pipelines, they go all over through, you know, mountains and ravines, you know, you know, cross rivers and things like that. So it's really from a safety stand standpoint, really proving itself and also it reduces environmental impact of of ground based methods. So at this time, that kinda gives you overview. If there's any questions, this is wouldn't would be a good time to take it. Thank you, Chuck. That was very informative. Thank you for your presentation on end of wanna thank Mark and Dave as well. Let's see. First up, we have About this. How does the m detector differ from traditional methods with having boots on the ground? Mark Dave, you care to answer that? Yeah. Thanks, Brett. What we have found is the m detector allows us to go places that traditional boots on the ground would struggle to get to. So for instance, if we're on a steep incline that say traditionally, guys trying to go up and it would take a half hour to an hour. We can fly it in less than ten minutes depending on how long the embankmenter is. Also, crossing highways, railroad tracks, anything like that Obviously, we can fly right over it without any issue. We don't have to worry about going around. We collect the data. We can come back and we can definitely do it quicker in those senses than somebody who's trying to walk that area. Right. Well, then the follow-up question they wanted to know is what made you choose the m detector for methane gas detection? After doing a lot of research, we found that the whole platform from Microdrones actually fit in our business plan. It's easy to use. It's processing is is easy. We can our outputs, our user friendly, and our customers really enjoy the fact that we have a CSV file the KMC download on the Google Earth, as well as video documentation. So the whole package in itself was kind of like a no brainer for us. And we saw it as definitely a huge plus in our service package we offer to our customers. Great. Great. Someone else wanted to know what is the post process time frame And what equipment is needed to process that data? I can handle this one. I the the post processing time is is very short. It's a very quick turnaround. So far as getting the data out of the drone, It's downloaded right in through the tablet. We use m detector program on the on the tablet. It spits out the CSV. And then from the CSV, we can edit that a little bit to be able to go to the format from the CSV to a usable file in Google Earth. And from there, it's made into a KMC, which we can save and provide to the customer. It's very short turnaround time maybe ten minutes after each flight. You can have three different kinds of outputs, your video file, your CSV and your KMZ, it's it's a really slick system. So Great. And then did have one other question that looked interesting. They were interested to know how often are you performing these inspections And what type of cost savings are you providing your customers? I can answer that. We are on a weekly basis, flying a week surveys. The cost savings is is is all about risk management, especially in the utility side. So that way, can we complete the scan of an area that is traditionally hard to get to by boots on the ground. We can do it faster. So there's a cost savings with that, and there's less risk. So the areas that we tend to fly are you're taking your employee minimizing the risk. So there's that much less of a chance of injury or anything like that, which we all know can really be important on the company's bottom line. Great. Great. I I wanna thank both Mark Dave and Chuck for their time today. It was a very informative webinar, and we appreciate everyone's participation. If you've submitted a question that we haven't gotten to, trust that we received it, and our team will be following up as soon as we can in the next forty eight hours.