A comparison between leak location methods based on the negative pressure wave

摘要

The leak location based on Negative Pressure Wave (NPW) is widely used but it is difficult to know which of the variants of this method is better for a real application. This is why, in this paper, a comparison between three NPW based methods to locate a leak in a pipeline is presented: Minimum Searching, Cross-correlation and Stationary Wavelet Transform. These methods are tested in a prototype with plastic pipeline transporting pressurized water and an evaluation is performed to determine which of them is the most suitable for implementation in a field pipeline. The evaluation is a comparative between the leak location absolute errors of the three methods with distinct pressure signal filtering and different leak behavior. Two experiments are performed and the results obtained are shown.