Masoud Taghvaei - Assistant Professor Niroo Research Institute
Abolfazl Ahmadi - Assistant Professor Iran University of Science and Technology
Beck - Senior lecturer Department of Mechanical Engineering University of Sheffield
Staszewski - Professor of Mechanical Engineering Department of Mechanical Engineering University of Sheffield

The detection and location of leaks in pipeline networks is a major problem and the reduction of these leaks has become a major priority for pipeline authorities around the world. Although the reasons for these leaks are well known, some of the current methods for locating and identifying them are either complicated or imprecise; most of them are time consuming. Due to their simplicity and robustness, transient analyses provide a plausible route towards leak detection. The work described here shows that cepstrum analysis is a viable approach to leak detection and location in pipeline networks. For this work, the time domain signals of these pressure transients were obtained using a single pressure transducer. These pressure signals were first filtered using discrete wavelets to remove the DC offset, and the low and high frequencies. They were then analyzed using a cepstrum method which identified the time delay between the initial wave and its reflections.

Pipeline networks, pressure transient, water hammer, wavelet analysis, Cepstrum