Leak Location for Urban Elbowed Water Pipe Based on Complex-Optimized FastICA Blind Deconvolution

Abstract

Previous research has primarily focused on leak diagnosis algorithms under the interference of outside environment noise. However, the former algorithms in leak detection are easily affected by noise from the pipe, especially the one that contains elbow noise. This article was mainly concerned with the effective and reliable approach to precisely locate leaks in the buried elbow pipeline system. To overcome the drawback of elbow noise interference and extract the leak source from the mixing signal in the greatest extent, this article proposes a novel frequency-domain-independent component analysis (ICA) blind deconvolution algorithm, which is based on a popular optimized FastICA (O-FICA) called complex-optimized FastICA (CO-FICA) algorithm. In comparison, CO-FICA differs from the time-domain blind convolution separation (T-BCS) algorithm, which transforms complicated time-domain convolution into a simple frequency-domain product problem. Compared with the conventional complex FastICA (C-FICA), the proposed CO-FICA method does not need to estimate signal statistics at each step, but it displays more excellent performance in convergent speed and separated precision. Altogether, the results from this study demonstrate that the localization precision of the proposed method is <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\approx 87\%$ </tex-math></inline-formula> under the interference of elbow noise.