Leak location using blind system identification in water distribution pipelines

• DOI: 10.1016/j.jsv.2007.07.067
• Publication Date: 2007-11-29T18:09:20Z
• Authors: Jin Yang; Yumei Wen; Ping Li
• Keywords: 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology; 6. Clean water

This paper presents a new leak location method without knowledge of pipe length in water distribution pipes. In conventional leak location surveys using acoustic signals in buried water distribution pipelines, the most widely used techniques are based on the correlation technique. The prerequisite of the method is that the accurate length of pipeline between two detection points is known. However, in practice, this prerequisite is not always satisfied. Based on the fact that the acquired acoustic signals contain the characteristics related to the two propagation channels, the blind system identification strategy is applied to estimate the transmission performances of the two acoustic channels. Due to the long impulse response of acoustic channel, the overlap-save and cross-correlation fitting technique are utilized in blind system identification to estimate the acoustic channels under a built constraint condition. In order to avoid converging to the local minima, the genetic algorithm is adopted to optimize the channel identification. The times due to the propagation of the leak source signal traveling from the leak point to either sensor are extracted from the identified acoustic channels. Consequently, for leak location, the pipe length is no longer a prerequisite. The practical location results show the validness of the proposed scheme.