Acoustical analysis and signal processing for leak location of buried pipes

지하매설 배관의 누수지점 탐지를 위한 음향학적 해석 및 신호처리

Leak noise is a good source to identify the exact location of a leak point of underground water pipelines. Water leak generates broadband noise from a leak location and can be propagated to both directions of water pipes. However, the necessity of long-range detect ion of this leak location makes to identify low-frequency acoustic waves rather than high frequency ones. Acoustic wave propagation coupled with surrounding boundaries including cast iron pipes is theoretical analyzed and the wave velocity was confirmed with experiment The leak locations were identified both by the acoustic emission (AE) method and the cross-correlation method. In a short-range distance, both the AE method and cross-correlation method are effective to detect leak position. However, the detect ion for a long-range distance required a lower frequency range accelerometers only because higher frequency waves were attenuated very quickly with the increase of propagation paths. Two algorithms for the cross-correlation function were suggested and a long-range detection has been achieved at real underground water pipelines longer than 300m.