An Intelligent Data Acquisition and Control System for Simulating the Detection of Pipeline Leakage

Abstract

The leakage of gas or oil pipelines causes tremendous economic losses and damages the environment. In this paper, we propose a method to control a testbed to simulate the pinhole condition of pipelines and a data acquisition system that can acquire data from the testbed. In the experiment, we artificially generate two different sizes of pinholes (2 mm and 0.3 mm) and collect four different types of data (pressure, flow, temperature, and acoustic emission) with and without pinholes to detect leaks in a pipeline. Experimental results show that all the sensors except the temperature sensor can detect a pinhole of 2 mm, but not a pinhole of 0.3 mm. Overall, we observe that the proposed method is affordable to simulate leaks in a pipeline.