• Journal of the Korean Society of Marine Environment & Safety
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.184-192
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• 2022

Valve internal leakage is caused by damage to the internal parts of the valve, resulting in accidents and shutdowns of the piping system. This study investigated the possibility of a real-time leak detection method using the acoustic emission (AE) signal generated from the piping system during the internal leakage of a butterfly valve. Datasets of raw time-domain AE signals were collected and postprocessed for each operation mode of the valve in a systematic manner to develop a data-driven model for the detection and classification of internal leakage, by applying machine learning algorithms. The aim of this study was to determine whether it is possible to treat leak detection as a classification problem by applying two classification algorithms: support vector machine (SVM) and convolutional neural network (CNN). The results showed different performances for the algorithms and datasets used. The SVM-based binary classification models, based on feature extraction of data, achieved an overall accuracy of 83% to 90%, while in the case of a multiple classification model, the accuracy was reduced to 66%. By contrast, the CNN-based classification model achieved an accuracy of 99.85%, which is superior to those of any other models based on the SVM algorithm. The results revealed that the SVM classification model requires effective feature extraction of the AE signals to improve the accuracy of multi-class classification. Moreover, the CNN-based classification can be a promising approach to detect both leakage and valve opening as long as the performance of the processor does not degrade.