Pipe Leaks Detection and Localization using Non-Intrusive Acoustic Monitoring
Résumé
These days, pipelines are vital to industry since they are an important component of both the distribution of water resources and the transmission of energy vectors. The biggest challenges in monitoring the pipes are the size of the infrastructures, their age, and the unpredictability of external events. The possibility of leaks in this situation might result in significant financial losses, leak detection and localization are both extremely difficult yet crucial tasks. Many of the shortcomings of the current approaches are that they need system shutdowns, involve invasive procedures or function with short pipelines only. A non-intrusive technique based on acoustic signal processing is presented in this paper. The innovative part of this method is the use of phase diagram representation and the diagram-based entropy computation to determine the position of leaks. We performed a continuous monitoring with our system on a pipeline and the results were compared with the results from the video inspection-based method. Regardless of how long the pipe is, the results show that our proposed technique has a high accuracy.