Evaluation of Piezodiagnostics Approach for Leaks Detection in a Pipe Loop

Pipe leaks detection has a great economic, environmental and safety impact. Although several methods have been developed to solve the leak detection problem, some drawbacks such as continuous monitoring and robustness should be addressed yet. Thus, this paper presents the main results of using a leaks detection and classification methodology, which takes advantage of piezodiagnostics principle. It consists of: i) transmitting/sensing guided waves along the pipe surface by means of piezoelectric device ii) representing statistically the cross-correlated piezoelectric measurements by using Principal Component Analysis iii) identifying leaks by using error indexes computed from a statistical baseline model and iv) verifying the performance of the methodology by using a Self-Organizing Map as visualization tool and considering different leak scenario. In this sense, the methodology was experimentally evaluated in a carbon-steel pipe loop under different leaks scenarios, with several sizes and locations. In addition, the sensitivity of the methodology to temperature, humidity and pressure variations was experimentally validated. Therefore, the effectiveness of the methodology to detect and classify pipe leaks, under varying environmental and operational conditions, was demonstrated. As a result, the combination of piezodiagnostics approach, cross-correlation analysis, principal component analysis, and Self-Organizing Maps, become as promising solution in the field of structural health monitoring and specifically to achieve robust solution for pipe leak detection.