Research on underwater pipeline leakage monitoring based on distributed fiber optic acoustic sensing technology

Abstract

Underwater pipeline transportation, as an important means of natural gas transportation, will cause great economic loss and environmental pollution in case of leakage damage. Aiming at improving the accuracy of pipeline leakage monitoring research, a method was proposed to monitor the leakage process of underwater natural gas pipelines using distributed optical fiber acoustic sensing technology. In this paper, a processing algorithm combining empirical modal decomposition method and wavelet decomposition reconstruction is used to extract the signal frequency domain features. The experimental results show that the frequency domain amplitude of the vibration signal gradually grows as the leakage orifice diameter and internal pipe pressure increase, and the standard deviation of the vibration signal of the pipeline exhibits a quadratic fitting relationship with the size of the leak aperture. The method proposed in this paper has a minimum leak aperture identification error of 7.2%, which can effectively improve the pipeline leak monitoring accuracy.