• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.568-576
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• 2010

It is widely known that the leak locating of underground plastic pipelines is much more difficult than that of cast iron pipelines. The precision of the leak locating depends upon the speed of leak signal and the time delay estimation between the two sensors on the pipeline. In this paper, six different windowing filters are considered to improve the time delay estimation especially for the plastic pipelines. The time delay is usually estimated from the peak time of cross-correlation functions. The filtering windows including rectangle, Roth, Wiener, SCOT, PHAT and maximum likelihood are applied to derive the generalized cross-correlation function and compared each other. Experimental results for the actual plastic underground water supply pipeline show that the introduction of the filtering windows improved the precision of time delay estimation. Some window functions provide excellent leak locating capability for the plastic pipe of 98 m long, which is less than 1 % of the pipe lengths. Also a new probabilistic approach that the combinations of all results from each filtering window is suggested for the better leak locating.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.36 no.5
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• pp.384-390
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• 2016

It is important to have a pipeline leak-detection system that determines the presence of a leak and quickly identifies its location. Current leak detection methods use a acoustic emission sensors, microphone arrays, and camera images. Recently, many researchers have been focusing on using cameras for detecting leaks. The advantage of this method is that it can survey a wide area and monitor a pipeline over a long distance. However, conventional methods using camera monitoring are unable to target an exact leak location. In this paper, we propose a method of detecting leak locations using leak-detection results combined with multi-frame analysis. The proposed method is verified by experiment.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2004.11a
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• pp.327-332
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• 2004

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. This sound propagation due to leak in water pipelines is not a non-dispersive wave any more because of the surrounding pipes and soil. However, the necessity of long-range detection 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 theoretically 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 detection 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 loom.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.44-52
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• 2014

Leakage is an important factor to be considered for the management of underground water supply pipelines in a smart water grid system, especially if the pipelines are aged and buried under the pavement or various structures of a highly populated city. Because the exact detection of the location of such leaks in pipelines is essential for their efficient operation, a new methodology for leak location detection based on frequency band variation, windowing filters, and probability is proposed in this paper. Because the exact detection of the leak location depends on the precision of estimation of time delay between sensor signals due to leak noise, some window functions that offer weightings at significant frequencies are applied for calculating the improved cross-correlation function. Experimental results obtained by applying this methodology to an actual buried water supply pipeline, ~ 253.9 m long and made of cast iron, revealed that the approach of frequency band variation with those windows and probability offers better performance for leak location detection.

• Journal of Korean Society of Water and Wastewater
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.461-470
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• 2018

In this study, the leak signal was measured by using an accelerometer to analyze the basic data and methodology for the development of the leak point estimation method in the water supply pipe. The measured results were analyzed by frequency analysis and cross-correlation analysis for leakage signals, and the error range was compared and analyzed with the actual leak point distance. As a result, it was confirmed that the vibration intensity due to leakage from the water leakage point was attenuated according to the distance. In the case of the ductile iron casting used in the experiment, the intensity of the signal at the 945 Hz, 1,500 Hz, 2,300 Hz band was increased with the change of the pressure in the pipe at 4mm of leakage hole. Also, it was confirmed that as the water pressure increases, the intensity of the leak signal increases but the similarity of the signal decreases. The results of this study confirm that the accelerometer sensor can be used efficiently for leak detection and it can be used as a basic data for the analysis for the development of leak point estimation method in the future.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Marine Environment & Safety
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.1044-1053
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• 2022

Time domain reflectometry (TDR) is a diagnostic technique to evaluate the physical integrity of cable and finds application in leak detection and localization of piping system. In this study, a cable-shaped leak detection sensor was proposed using the TDR technique for monitoring leakage detection of ship's engine room seawater piping system. The cable sensor was developed using a twisted pair arrangement and wound by an absorbent material. The availability and performance of the sensor for leak detection and localization were evaluated on a lab-scale pipeline set up. The developed sensor was installed onto the pipes and flanges of the lab-scale set up and various TDR waveforms were acquired and analyzed according to the dif erent variables including the number of twists and sheath thickness. The result indicated that the twisted cable sensor was able to produce clear and smooth signal as compared to the TDR sensor with a parallel arrangement. The optimal number of twist was determined to be above 10 per the unit length. The optimal diameter of sheath thickness that results in the desired sensitivity was determined to be ranging from 80% up to 120% of the diameter of the conductor. The linear regression analysis for estimation of leak localization was carried out to estimate the location of the leakage, and the result was a determination coefficient of 0.9998, indicating a positive relationship with the actual leakage point. The proposed TDR based leak detection method appears to be an effective method for monitoring leakage of ship's seawater piping system.