Leak detection and localization using acoustic emission technique

Article history: Received 6 April, 2015 Accepted 10 October 2015 Available online 11 October 2015 This article provides a method of acoustic emission (AE) technique to detect leakage in pipeline and locate the position of the leakage. The AE sensor is made of piezoelectric effect transducer to pick up the acoustic emission signal which is generated from the turbulent flow at the leak position. The signal conditioning unit is used to enhanced and eliminate the background noise from the leak location sources. The main acoustic emission processing unit is used to acquire and process the extracted AE characteristic parameters from preprocessing waveform. The leak pipeline is simulated by drilling the hole and plugged with M8 screw at different locations. The results show that the proposed AE method can detect and locate simultaneous leak condition in pipeline with promising results. © 2016 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.