Natural gas leakage: Forward and inverse method of leakage field based on multipath concentration monitoring

Abstract

Natural gas leakage can easily lead to safety accidents and environmental pollution, affecting normal safe production and sustainable energy development. Among them, the leakage accident caused by the integrity failure of the process equipment is particularly noteworthy. To improve the efficiency of methane leakage monitoring and the accuracy of leakage source location, the forward prediction model of leakage concentration field, the optimization model of monitoring equipment layout, and the inversion model of leakage source location were established. To evaluate the model’s applicability, an open-air oil–gas joint station was selected for experimental simulation. The monitoring data of the open circuit laser methane sensor and the forward simulation results of the leakage concentration field were compared. It was found that at 30 % methane concentration, the monitoring distance was 0–6 m, with high monitoring accuracy. Then, by eliminating redundant monitoring sensors, three leakage field concentration monitoring paths are formed. A representative leakage source scenario set is selected for inversion localization. In the simulation of the single-point leakage experiment, the leakage location error is 1.824 m, and the average relative error is 3.6 %. Through error analysis, the results show that the inversion positioning model can also have a good adaptability to the parameter estimation of the leakage source when there are only 3 sets of observation data.