Leak detection for transport pipelines based on autoregressive modeling

A leak detection method based on autoregressive modeling is proposed. It requires only four pressure measurements, two at each end of the pipeline. A leak above 0.5% can be reliably and quickly detected by analyzing the time sequences of the pressure gradient at the inlet and outlet of the pipeline. It can be easily implemented because the computational expenditure is small. Its effectiveness has been verified by tests on a 10-mm-diameter, 120-m-long experimental water pipeline. >