Monitoring underground water leakage pattern by ground penetrating radar (GPR) using 800 MHz antenna frequency

Abstract

Abstract. Water is the most treasure natural resources, however, a huge amount of water are lost during its distribution that leads to water leakage problem. The leaks meant the waste of money and created more economic loss to treat and fix the damaged pipe. Researchers and engineers have put tremendous attempts and effort, to solve the water leakage problem especially in water leakage of buried pipeline. An advanced technology of ground penetrating radar (GPR) has been established as one of the non-destructive testing (NDT) method to detect the underground water pipe leaking. This paper focuses on the ability of GPR in water utility field especially on detection of water leaks in the underground pipeline distribution. A series of laboratory experiments were carried out using 800-MHz antenna, where the performance of GPR on detecting underground pipeline and locating water leakage was investigated and validated. A prototype to recreate water-leaking system was constructed using a 4-inch PVC pipe. Different diameter of holes, i.e. ¼ inch, ½ inch, and ¾ inch, were drilled into the pipe to simulate the water leaking. The PVC pipe was buried at the depth of 60 cm into the test bed that was filled with dry sand. 15 litres of water was injected into the PVC pipe. The water leakage patterns in term of radargram data were gathered. The effectiveness of the GPR in locating the underground water leakage was ascertained, after the results were collected and verified.

Theoretical aspects and numerical modelling of the GPR method to analyse its possibilities for the detection of leakages in urban water supply networks

“…ERTelectrical resistivity tomography, SP -self potential) and electromagnetic (i.e. GPR -ground-penetrating radar, GCM -ground conductivity meter) methods are used (Stampoli dis et al 2003, Pilcher et al 2007, Crocco et al 2009, Erasmus 2009, Bimpas et al 2010, Puust 2010, Demirci et al 2012, Ayala-Cabrera et al 2013, Cataldo et al 2014, Hadjimitsis et al 2014, Hawari et al 2016, Lai et al 2016, Amran et al 2018, De Coster et al 2019, El-Zahab & Zayed 2019, Aslam et al 2017, Yang et al 2022).…”

Cross-correlation analysis of multiple fibre optic hydrophones for water pipeline leakage detection

“…Pipeline leakage detection methods are roughly categorized by two groups, i.e., hardware-based and software-based (Datta and Sarkar 2016). Hardware-based methods include acoustic emission (AE) sensors (Grabec 1978;Lim 2015;Miller et al 1999), related leak detectors (Chatzigeorgiou et al 2015) and ground penetrating radar (GPR) (Amran et al 2018;Lai et al 2016;Nakhkash and Mahmood-Zadeh 2004;Stampolidis et al 2003), etc., and software-based methods involve negative pressure wave (NPW) (Brunone 1999;Ge et al 2008;Lu et al 2016), support vector machine (SVM) (Ni et al 2013;Wang et al 2018), transient test-based techniques (TTBTS) (Brunone et al 2008) and artificial neural network (ANN) (Jin et al 2010;Mounce and Machell 2006;Ridolfi et al 2014), etc. Through the analysis and comparison, the defects in the current detection methods were also revealed (Guo et al 2019).…”

Remote Thermal Water Leakage Sensor With a Laser Communication System

“…Some of these prototypes are built to test the effectiveness of ground penetrating radars (GPRs) in detecting underground leakages. These prototypes consist of wooden tanks filled with soil where PVC pipes are buried [37], [5]. The wooden box can be constructed without the usage of metals such as screws and nails to avoid interference with radar signal during GPR scanning [37].…”

“…These prototypes consist of wooden tanks filled with soil where PVC pipes are buried [37], [5]. The wooden box can be constructed without the usage of metals such as screws and nails to avoid interference with radar signal during GPR scanning [37]. On the other hand, in the testing of acoustic methods, which depends on detecting the acoustic waves produced by leaking water, experimental setup was noticed to be installed in an outdoor field [38], [39].…”