Pre-localization of Two Leaks in a Water Pipeline Using Hydraulic and Spatial Constraints

This article presents a method to estimate frequency distributions of the parameters associated with the presence of two leaks in a main water pipeline: the locations and the emitter coefficients. Since the method is offline, it can be used to locate simultaneous or sequential leaks; the only requirement is that both leaks must be present when the data for diagnosis are acquired. The method requires as input information pressure and flow rate data to be measured at the pipeline boundaries. In a first stage, hydraulic quasi-steady state relations are computed by using the input information. These relations are used to calculate hydraulic and spatial constraints. In a second stage, Monte Carlo simulations are used together with the previously defined restrictions to obtain frequency distributions of the parameters associated with both leaks. To test the feasibility and potentiality of the method, it was implemented and tested in MATLAB with synthetic data.