Eventos Anais de eventos
CONEM 2018
X Congresso Nacional de Engenharia Mecânica
AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE EFFECTS OF SIGNAL DISTORTION ON THE ACCURACY OF TIME DELAY ESTIMATION FOR LEAK DETECTION IN BURIED PLASTIC WATER PIPES
Submission Author:
Pedro Christian Ayala Castillo , PA , Brazil
Co-Authors:
Pedro Christian Ayala Castillo, Michael Brennan, Fabricio Cesar Lobato de Almeida, Fábio Kroll de Lima, Daniel Henrique de Sousa Obata, Amarildo Tabone Paschoalini
Presenter: Pedro Christian Ayala Castillo
doi://10.26678/ABCM.CONEM2018.CON18-0244
Abstract
A major problem for water companies is leakage from underground pipes. For many years, acoustic techniques have been used to find leaks. One particular technique is the correlation of leak noise which is measured using sensors placed either side of a leak. Using the time difference of the arrival of the leak noise at the sensors, and knowledge of the speed at which the noise propagates in the pipe, the distance of the leak from one of the sensor positions can be estimated. In this paper, the effects on the time delay estimation of two types of leak noise signal distortion are studied. First, the effect of quantization noise caused by an analog/digital (A to D) converter is investigated. It is shown that a correlator with a small number of bits in its A to D converter can work as well as a system with a large number of bits. Second, the effect of clipping of the leak signal is studied. It is shown that this has a negligible effect on the estimated time delay and hence the location of the leak. Thus, it is postulated that simple and hence inexpensive hardware could be used for leak noise correlators, rather than the complex and expensive systems usually found in use today.
Keywords
Detecção de vazamentos, correlacionador acústico, estimação de atraso do tempo., distortions in leak noise
