Detection of leak location in a pipeline by acoustic signal

Gas or water leaks in pipes that are buried under ground or that are situated in the walls of buildings may occur due to aging or unpredictable accidents, such as earthquakes. Therefore, the detection of leaks in pipes is an important task and has been investigated extensively. In the present paper, we propose a novel leak detection method by means of acoustic wave. We inject an acoustic chirp signal into a target pipeline and then estimate the leak location from the delay time of the compressed pulse by passing the reflected signal through a correlator. In order to distinguish a leak reflection in a complicated pipeline arrangement, the reflection characteristics of leaks are carefully discussed by numerical simulations and experiments. There is a remarkable difference in the reflection characteristics between the leak and other types of discontinuity, and the property can be utilized to distinguish the leak reflection. The experimental results show that, even in a complicated pipe arrangement including bends and branches, the proposed approach can successfully implement the leak detection. Furthermore, the proposed approach has low cost and is easy to implement because only a personal computer and some commonly equipment are required.