抄録
A new method based on an acoustic approach is described for locating a pinhole occurred in a gas pipeline. Increase or decrease in the pressure in a packed pipeline with a pinhole leads to the gas blow out or in from the pinhole by which sound noise with the wide frequency range is generated. The acoustic noise generated at the pinhole induces the standing waves in the pipeline just like as a flute. Modes of the standing waves are determined by the length of the packed pipeline and the site of the pinhole.
A mathematical acoustic model to describe the phenomena above was built and a method to locate a pinhole was presented by using the model. The method requires only one microphone which is set at a terminal in the packed pipeline. A simple algorithm applying the Fourier transformation to the acoustic signal detected by the microphone yields the accurate location of the pinhole site of the pipeline. Laboratory experiments verified the modeling and the location method.
