Leak detection conditions in a pipeline via a geometric approach Conference Paper uri icon

abstract

  • This work studies under what conditions there exists a solution to the multi-leak detection problem in a pipeline when only measurements of pressure and flow at its extremes are available. A fluid model of finite dimension is considered with leaks distributed equally throughout the pipeline. The analysis begins reformulating the multi-leak detection problem in the following way; each residual must be robust to one leak but sensitive to the others. The conclusion of the analysis shows that this reformulation fails in general if one assumes more than two leaks with fixed positions in the pipeline. This fact is proved using geometric tools and extending the necessary and sufficient conditions presented in (De-Persis and Isidori, 2001) to get a residual generator assuming one set of faults and one set of disturbances. In particular, the residual generators designed considering a nonlinear model and simulated data with two leaks show that both leaks are perfectly isolated. However, the residuals in the case of experimental data shown that a decision logic is required to isolate the leak, because of the leak uncertain position. © 2003 International Federation of Automatic Control.

publication date

  • 2003-01-01