Leak monitoring and positioning of pressurized water pipeline network

Due to the presence of numerous branches in the pressurized water pipeline network (PWPN), leak-caused negative pressure wave (NPW) has non-unique propagation path, so leak detection and positioning for PWPN is highly challenging. This paper proposes a leak monitoring and positioning method for PWPN based on the time delay matching of NPW propagation. Via introducing the NPW velocity equation, the PWPN is divided into short segments with equal NPW propagation duration, and then the shortest NPW propagation path from each discrete point, namely hypothetical leak point, to each deployed pressure transmitter, is efficiently numerically searched and then used to calculate the NPW arrival time and establish a contrastive time delay library (CTDL) in advance. A set of signal processing algorithm are developed to capture the NPW arrival time and compare these measured values with the pre-established CTDL to accurately position leak point in the PWPN. The effectiveness of this method is verified via leak localization experiments on a field PWPN with an area of 12 x 12 km and 1478 branches. The proposed method can achieve leak positioning with errors less than 100 m throughout the entire pipeline network when only six pressure transmitters are effective.