Localization of leakages in underwater natural gas pipelines for multipath propagation

Abstract

Underwater natural gas pipelines (UNGPs) are frequently used to transport natural gas, which is an important energy resource. UNGPs can get punctured because of several reasons such as especially corrosion and their increasing ages. in this study, a novel passive acoustic based method, which uses received signal strength, is proposed to locate leak hole in UNGP remotely for multipath acoustic channels. Success of this method is analyzed by numerical works, where parameters of a real life UNGP are used. Numerical results showed that the leakages can be located with low average location errors far from several kilometers depending upon ambient noise and number of receiver for multipath acoustic channels.