PIPELINE LEAK DETECTION METHOD Russian patent published in 2024 - IPC F17D5/02 

FIELD: diagnostics of leaks in pipelines.

SUBSTANCE: invention can be used to determine presence of leaks in areas not accessible for technical inspection. Essence lies in the fact that at first noises of the pipeline are recorded. Fact of occurrence of leakage is established by change of value of scaling exponent α of acoustic noise with length N, calculated using detrended fluctuation analysis. For this purpose, the cumulative sum y(k): is calculated, where z(i) is the pipeline acoustic noise amplitude (i=1,...,N), z̄ is the pipeline acoustic noise amplitude average value, the series of y(k) values is divided into N_n non-intersecting intervals of length n:N_n=N/n, within each interval by least squares linear approximation of sequence y(k) is performed and root-mean-square error of linear approximation is calculated F(n): where y_n(k) are the values of the approximating function, for the dependence of lg F(n) on lg n, a regression equation is determined in the form of: lg F(n)=α·lg n+const, where α is a scaling exponent, const is a constant of the regression equation.

EFFECT: increased reliability of leak detection due to simplification of measurement results interpretation, elimination of errors in decision making.

1 cl, 8 dwg