MFCC-LSTM framework for leak detection and leak size identification in gas-liquid two-phase flow pipelines based on acoustic emission

•This paper presents an MFCC-LSTM framework based on acoustic emission technology.•The proposed framework can achieve leak detection and leak size identification in gas–liquid two-phase flow pipelines.•This paper considers various operating conditions including flow pattern leak size leak direction and leak location.•The proposed framework shows a good identification ability and generation ability. Two-phase gas–liquid flows are crucial to the pipeline system. Due to their complicated flow state, existing leak detection techniques are unsuitable for two-phase flow pipelines. To avoid accidents caused by a leak of pipelines, we present a framework for combining the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient and long short-term memory (MFCC-LSTM) based on acoustic emission (AE). A series of experiments are performed considering 1152 operating conditions, including flow pattern, leak size, direction, and location. In addition, the detection capability of the different features of AE signals combined with LSTM is discussed. The results show that the recognition accuracy of the MFCC-LSTM framework reaches 98.4%. Then, we further perform leak size identification under different flow patterns and found that the MFCC-LSTM framework still exhibits excellent performance. The proposed MFCC-LSTM framework provides a promising solution to identify the leak state and size in two-phase flow pipelines based on the AE technique.