Theoretical Investigation on the Characteristics of Leak Noise for Natural Gas Pipelines

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the spectral characteristics of leak noise at the source relevant to fluid dynamics for natural gas pipelines. Comparison is made between the flow field characteristics for the buried and above-ground pipelines to demonstrate the differences in aero-acoustics generation mechanism. The fundamental spectral parameters including the sound pressure level (SPL) and power spectral density (PSD), are extracted to characterize the leak noise under different pipeline conditions of operation pressure and leak orifice diameter. Numerical results show that the leak noise of buried pipelines has less energy and are more concentrated at lower frequencies, compared with that of above-ground pipelines. It is demonstrated that leak noise is predominantly governed by the dipole and the quadrupole sources, generated from the gas–solid interaction and turbulent disturbance, respectively. It is shown that the dipole source is attenuated and the quadrupole source is amplified with the leak orifice diameter for buried pipelines whereas both are amplified for above-ground pipelines. Moreover, it is suggested that the feature parameters of fluid dynamics, such as the average dynamic pressure and turbulent kinetic energy, can be used to characterize the leak noise mechanism for natural gas pipelines.