Multipoint leak localization for pipelines via acoustic wave amplitude ratio

Pipeline leak localization is significant for maintaining the regular operation of pipelines. This paper proposes a multipoint leak localization method for pipelines via the acoustic wave amplitude ratio, which addresses the issue of the traditional time delay estimation method (TDE) not being able to locate multiple leaks simultaneously. Firstly, a multipoint leak localization method for pipelines is established without time delay estimation and acoustic velocity. This method merely needs to determine the amplitude of the leakage acoustic wave propagating to both ends of the pipeline to achieve leakage localization. Secondly, the improved empirical wavelet transform (IEWT) method denoises the leakage acoustic wave, which can obtain an accurate acoustic amplitude to reduce the localization error. Finally, the trouble that the mutation factor and crossover probability cannot be adaptively selected in the differential evolution (DE) algorithm is improved, and the improved differential evolution (IDE) algorithm is used to solve the objective function to obtain the position of each leakage point. Field experiments show that the multipoint leak localization method proposed in this paper has perfect accuracy, and the minimum localization error is 11 m.