A novel methodology for quantitative identification of pipeline leakage and negative pressure wave velocity

The detection of negative pressure waves (NPWs) is commonly used to localize leakage in pipeline integrity monitoring. However, the velocity of NPWs cannot always be accurately determined under complicated environmental and operational conditions, resulting in localization errors inevitably. Based on a fluid dynamics model of the pipeline, a relationship between the leakage properties and the NPW transient dynamics was established, and then a novel method was proposed to quantitatively identify the leakage location as well as the NPW velocity in the pipeline. The proposed method requires only one pair of dynamic pressure sensors to monitor the leakage between the proper distance in the pipeline. A series of experiments were conducted on a scaled model pipeline to verify the feasibility of the method. The experimental results demonstrate that the presented method can accurately identify the location and severity of the leakage without the NPW velocity in advance, which overcomes the limitations of the traditional approach. The novel method provides a promising technique of leakage detection for pipeline integrity management.