Leak location in gas pipelines using cross-time–frequency spectrum of leakage-induced acoustic vibrations

The correlation-based location methods are widely used in leak detection of the pipelines assuming that the acoustic speed has been known and constant. In practice, the acoustic speed is frequency-varying due to the dispersions of gas-leak-induced acoustic waves, and thus the assumption is not supported. In this work, a location scheme based on cross-time–frequency spectrum (CTFS) is intended for the gas-leak-induced acoustic waves with frequency-varying acoustic speed. In the scheme, the CTFS is obtained by the one-dimensional Fourier transform of the time domain convolution between the kernel function in correlation domain and the instantaneous cross-correlation of the two spatially separately collected acoustic signals on either sides of a leakage. Then, the time difference of arrival (TDOA) and the corresponding frequency information are extracted simultaneously when the CTFS reaches the maximum value. The resulting peak frequency is used to online determine the frequency-dependant acoustic speed in combination with the known dispersive curve of gas-leak-induced dominated mode. Finally, the gas leakage is located by the TDOA and the frequency-dependant acoustic speed of real-time determination instead of constant acoustic speed. Consequently, for the proposed scheme, the constant acoustic speed is no longer a prerequisite. The proposed scheme has been experimentally validated in leak detection of gas pipelines and results demonstrate that the average relative location errors are reduced by six times compared with the commonly used correlation-based location method.