Leak Detection for Gas and Liquid Pipelines by Transient Modeling

Abstract

Abstract The leakage of hydrocarbon products from a pipeline represents not only the loss of natural resources, but also is a serious and dangerous environment pollution and potential fire disaster. So quick awareness and accurately location of the leak event are important to cut down the losses and avoid the disasters. A leak detection method using transient modeling is introduced in this paper. This method is suitable for both gas and liquid pipelines with comprehensive consideration of the transient flow features of compressible flows and stochastic processing and noise filtering of the meter readings. The correlations for diagnosing the leak location and amount are derived based on the online real time observation and the readings of pressure, temperature, and flow rate at both ends of the pipeline. As an online real time system, great efforts have been paid to the stochastic processing and noise filtering of the meter readings and the models to reduce the impact of signal noise. It is essential too for the robust real time pipeline observer to have the self study and adjustment abilities in response to the large varieties of pipeline configuration, pipeline operation conditions, and fluid properties. Real application cases are presented here to demonstrate this leak detection method. For example, in the leak detection of a crude oil pipeline of 34.5 km and Φ219mm, this method located the leak at 16.6 km from the pipeline upstream end which is only 0.6 km away from the actual leak location.