Making Pipe 4.0 for a connected world

One manufactured product that remains unchanged from the time the first one was developed (4,000 years ago) until now is pipe, which has had one function: to convey fluids. A pipe developed by Tri-D Dynamics, one that carries fluid and data, is bound to join the many advanced products that have made Industry 4.0 possible. Getty Images

Studied by historians, sociologists, and economists all over the world, the first industrial revolution put the world on a growth path like no other trend. While it consisted of many inventions, its origin was in 1760 in the textile industry in Great Britain. The crux of the revolution was automating tasks that formerly were manual, and it led to exponential productivity improvements. In 1750, Great Britain imported 2.5 million lbs. of cotton; 100 years later, it imported 588 million lbs.

Of course, the innovations never stopped, but eventually the pace slowed and historians mark the end of it around 1830. The second industrial revolution, which was augmented by the mass production of reliable steel, took off in the 1850s or so. The third one was a matter of scaled-down and increasingly capable electronic systems. Large, energy-hogging vacuum tubes were replaced by the transistor (invented in 1947), which led to the modernizing of many machines, products, and processes. It’s fair to say that Industry 4.0 pulls together concepts from each of the previous industrial revolutions, relying heavily on electronics—emphasizing that electronic systems have become more complex, more dispersed, more mobile, and often wireless.

This might be hard to believe, but the study of metal pipe requires a much longer timeline than the four industrial revolutions. Copper pipe from about 4,000 years ago has been discovered in Egypt, meaning that metal pipe coincided with the age of the pharaohs. It’s not an exaggeration to say that metal pipe was one of the inventions that marked the end of the Stone Age.

From that time until now the pipe market has developed to embrace both welded and seamless products made by progressive forming on mills, forming in hydraulic presses, extrusion, and piercing. It would be difficult to list all of the improvements in both welded and seamless pipe products since the initial processes were developed, but the choices in materials, diameters, and wall thicknesses alone hint at the progress. The same goes for the quality of modern tube and pipe products—dimensional consistency, straightness, and weld integrity.

What hasn’t changed in 4,000 years is pipe’s sole function: to convey fluid. And that’s it.

Can pipe do more? The founders of Tri-D Dynamics think so. They have developed pipe to fulfill two roles, conveying fluid and data (see the cover story of this issue). Intended for downhole use in the oil industry, this pipe has sensors and cable embedded in its wall. The drilling and extracting processes rely on no small amount of data from downhole activities, as well as many tools that are inserted, monitored, and extracted at various stages of well development.

Metal pipe has changed a lot since it was first developed 4,000 years ago, but this is the first fundamental change to its function and likely will usher in a new age of smart infrastructure.