Mobile instrument for intelligent leak detection and location on underground water supply pipelines

The paper discusses the instrumentation of leak detection and location on underground water supply pipelines based on adaptive algorithms. The equipment is designed to be self-contained and portably mobile with sensors, signal conditioning and data acquisition units and a laptop PC operating signal processing, information analysis and instrument control. The vibrational acoustic signals collected on tubular pipelines are used for pinpointing a leak or leaks in buried pipelines. Because of the complexity and the heavy corruption with ambient noises, it is essential to use an appropriate signal model and the scheme of analysis and synthesis in order to extract leak signatures and specify leak locations. In addition, the features of vibrational acoustic signals vary with the materials, the sizes and the inbuilt conditions of tubular pipes. It is difficult to pre-determine the knowledge of signals, such as the spectral knowledge. Here, an adaptive detection and estimation strategy is proposed based on LMS adaptive filtering and modified Wavelet denoising. The availability for leak detection and pinpointing estimation is automatically analyzed by the signal processing procedure without any prerequisite on signals and the procedure may adaptively find the way to get better estimate.