On-site leakage locating of underground natural gas pipeline based on Ne tracer by miniature time-of-flight mass spectrometry

Natural gas pipeline leakage seriously endangers people's lives and properties, and there is an urgent need for on-site, rapid, and accurate locating the leakage point of the underground natural gas pipeline. Here, we added neon gas to natural gas pipelines as a tracer gas, and used a miniature time-of-flight mass spectrometry (mini-TOFMS) to on-site detect neon gas to quickly locate the leak point of underground natural gas pipelines. The mini-TOFMS used capillary tube sampling to directly analyze the leaked neon gas without sample preparation, and the analysis time of a single sample was only 60 s, which was less than one-seventeenth that of traditional off-line gas chromatography (GC) method. The mini-TOFMS exhibited a linear response range from 69 ppmv to 3.0 × 105 ppmv with the limit of detection (LOD, S/N = 3) of 19.0 ppmv. The correlation of GC and mini-TOFMS for Ne quantitative analysis was as high as 0.98. The performance of the newly designed method with the mini-TOFMS was demonstrated by on-site locating the underground natural gas pipeline leakage point in the experimental station. And leakage point of the natural gas pipeline, especially for those pipelines with different gas pressure buried under the same road, can be found more efficiently and accurately.