Study on the Application of Acoustic Leak Detection Method for Natural Gas Pipelines

Abstract

In order to study the fundamental principles of acoustic leak detection method for natural gas pipelines, this method is applied in the laboratory and the field experiments. First, the experiments are made in the laboratory and the leakage signal characteristics are concluded. Then the field experiments are accomplished to acquire leakage signals, which will be processed by the time-domain analysis, the frequency-domain analysis and the joint time-frequency analysis together to extract the characteristics. Finally, the extracted acoustic characteristics are applied to detect the leakage of the long distance pipeline. The results show that the acoustic characteristics extracted by wavelet transform can be propagated long-distance. Therefore, the acoustic leak detection method can be applied to long-distance natural gas pipelines.