Fluid Pipeline Leak Localization Relying on Acoustic Emission Signal Analysis

This paper introduces a leak–localization method for fluid pipeline through monitoring bursts in acoustic emission signals. First, the algorithm seeks bursts in individual signals using the Neyman–Pearson signal detection theorem, groups adjacent bursts from two signals captured by two acoustic emission sensors mounted at two pipeline ends and localizes those burst sources through the time difference of arrival technique. Then, a coordinate histogram is constructed from a set of resulting burst source coordinates in a period to indicate a suspicious leaky position on the testing pipeline. The experimental results reveal that the proposed technique can determine single leaks with a mean relative location error of 1.2 while conventional methods return relative errors of greater than 7.5. Furthermore, the proposed method can properly localize two simultaneous leaks whereas others cannot. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.