Leakage location system for oil pipeline on basis of stress wave detection

Abstract

An online monitoring system was developed for rapidly determining the exact location of the holing position in an oil pipeline by monitoring and analyzing the characteristics of the strain wave caused by the hole. The system has a master-slaver computer structure based on a remote wireless network. The master system takes charge of managing and controlling the whole system, identifying the holing stress wave, and calculating the holing position. The slaver system is responsible for sampling the strain wave signal from the pipeline. The characteristics of the strain wave signal are extracted by a Hilbert-Huang transform based on a signal processing approach. The exact holing position can be obtained by a time delay locating method with stress wave characteristics. The experimental results of the in-service pipeline show that the average locating error of the system is less than 10 m, the accuracy ratio for the holing alarm is more than 90%, and the time that the system takes to respond to the leakage is less than 10 s.

Keywords

pipeline / leakage location / stress wave / computer monitoring / Hilbert-Huang transform