Bistatic tomographic GPR imaging for incipient pipeline leakage evaluation

Abstract

In this work, we present an inverse scattering approach to address the timely detection of damage and leakage from pipelines via multi-bistatic ground penetrating radar (GPR) surveys. The approach belongs to the class of linearized distorted wave models and explicitly accounts for the available knowledge on the investigated scenario in terms of pipe position and size. The inversion is regularized by studying the properties of the relevant linear operator in such a way to guarantee an early warning capability. The approach has been tested by means of synthetic data generated via a finite-difference time-domain forward solver capable of accurately and realistically modeling GPR experiments. The achieved results show that it is possible to detect the presence of leakage even in its first stages of development.