Leak Detection of Gas Pipelines Based on Characteristics of Acoustic Leakage and Interfering Signals

When acoustic method is used in leak detection for natural gas pipelines,the external interferences including operation of compressor and valve,pipeline knocking,etc.,should be distinguished with acoustic leakage signals to improve the accuracy and reduce false alarms.In this paper,the technologies of extracting characteristics of acoustic signals were summarized.The acoustic leakage signals and interfering signals were measured by experiments and the characteristics of time-domain,frequency-domain and time-frequency domain were extracted.The main characteristics of time-domain are mean value,root mean square value,kurtosis,skewness and correlation function,etc.The features in frequency domain were obtained by frequency spectrum analysis and power spectrum density,while time-frequency analysis was accomplished by short time Fourier transform.The results show that the external interferences can be removed effectively by the characteristics of time domain,frequency domain and time-frequency domain.It can be drawn that the acoustic leak detection method can be applied to natural gas pipelines and the characteristics can help reduce false alarms and missing alarms.