Water Main Burst Event Detection and Localization

Abstract

In this paper we present a technique for detecting and locating burst events in pipelines. The proposed method uses wavelet analysis of the high-rate pressure data to detect pipe burst events. Multiscale wavelet analysis of the pressure signal will be shown to be robust to impulsive noise encountered in the physical phenomena under observation. The wavelet coefficients also allow us to obtain additional information about the nature of the signal feature detected, which can used for further feature classification. A local search method is also proposed to accurately determine the arrival time of the pressure front associated with the burst event. The detection performance of these algorithms is verified through leak-off experiments performed on the [email protected] test bed deployed on the water distribution system in Singapore. We also propose a graph-based search algorithm which uses the arrival times of the pressure front at different locations within the water distribution system to determine the actual location of the pipe burst event.