Towards an in-situ measurement of wave velocity in buried plastic water distribution pipes for the purposes of leak location

Water companies are under constant pressure to ensure that water leakage is kept to a minimum. Leak noise correlators are often used to help find and locate leaks. These devices correlate acoustic or vibration signals from sensors which are placed either side the location of a suspected leak. The peak in the cross-correlation function of the measured signals gives the time difference between the arrival times of the leak noise at the sensors. To convert the time delay into a distance, the speed at which the leak noise propagates along the pipe (wave-speed) needs to be known. Often, this is estimated from historical wave-speed data measured on other pipes obtained at various times and under various conditions, or it is estimated from tables which are calculated using simple formula. Usually, the wave-speed is not measured directly at the time of the correlation measurement and is therefore potentially a source of significant error in the localisation of the leak. In this paper, a new method of measuring the wave-speed in-situ in the presence of a leak, that is robust and simple, is explored. Experiments were conducted on a bespoke large scale buried pipe test-rig, in which a leak was also induced in the pipe between the measurement positions to simulate a condition that is likely to occur in practice. It is shown that even in conditions where the signal to noise ratio is very poor, the wave-speed estimate calculated using the new method is less than 5% different from the best estimate of 387 m s−1.