Heating pipeline leakage locating of pressure pulsation signal based on the integration of time–frequency characteristic extraction

Abstract Heating pipelines play a vital role in urban infrastructure. Accurately locating pipeline leakage is essential. To address the limitations of the existing locate methods in terms of accuracy and efficiency, a new method based on the integration of time–frequency characteristic extraction (ITFE) was proposed. To study the accuracy of pipeline leakage locating in the ITFE and short-time Fourier transform (STFT) method. The experimental platform for pipeline leakage locating was established, and the pressure pulsation (PP) signal in the two leakage locations was collected. The time-domain signals are analyzed by the method of STFT and ITFE. Finally, the time difference obtained by the two methods is used for pipeline leakage location calculation. The experimental results demonstrate that the time delay differences for leak location of the PP signal using the STFT method are 0 s and 0 s, respectively. The time delay differences of the ITFE method for locating the leakage of the PP signal are 0.000 888 s and 0.000 698 s, respectively. The positioning errors are 0.049 m and 0.043 m, respectively. The relative positioning errors are 3.61% and 2.88%, respectively. The accuracy of pipeline leakage location using the ITFE method is above 96%.