Performance evaluation of wireless accelerometer sensor for water pipeline leakage

Abstract

Recently, an acoustic method is used in a water industry to detect and localise the leak in the water pipeline. However, the acoustic leak detection is only feasible for the metal pipes and has several limitations when applied to soft materials like plastic pipes. The objective of this paper is to investigate the accuracy of leakage detection for an Acrylonitrille Butadience Styrene (ABS) pipe using a vibration technique. This paper employs an accelerometer sensor called MPU6050 to measure the vibration in the water pipeline from three different axes, which are x-, y- and z-axis. The water pipeline used in this study is a high pressure pipe, which is an inch size of ABS pipe with a length of approximately 10 meters. We used an Arduino controller board to process the vibration data from the accelerometer sensor and transmit (Tx) the data over wireless ZigBee networks every ten millisecond elapsed time. The water pipeline system is examined based on three states, (i) no pipe leakage, (ii) a l mm, and (iii) a 3mm sizes of leaking holes. In our experiments, the pressure is varied at four different levels, 0.6, 0.8, 1.0 and 1.2 kgf/cm2. The main finding can be summarized as follow: 1) when the pressure is varied to 0.6, 0.8, 1.0 and 1.2 kgf/cm2, the frequency has significant difference between no leak and leakage conditions, 2) when the pressure is varied to 0.6, 0.8 and 1.0kgf/cm2, the frequency can identify the sizes of the leaking holes, and 3) when the pressure is varied to 1.2kgf/cm2, the leakage hole size is difficult to identify, but the normal and abnormal conditions can be determined.