A Two-Sensor Acoustic Correlator for Locating Leaks in Water Pipes

A design and modelling study (SIMULATED, NOT MEASURED; no hardware built or tested) of a two-sensor acoustic correlator that locates leaks in buried water mains from the cross-correlation time lag between two clamped sensors. The computed budget gives wave speeds of 1190.8 m/s in a 300 mm ductile-iron pipe and 295.9 m/s in a 200 mm HDPE pipe after the elastic pipe-wall correction, shows that wave-speed uncertainty (1.5 m at a 300 m baseline for a 1% error) dominates over timing and statistical errors, and shows that attenuation limits the maximum baseline on HDPE to 142.9 m at 400 Hz under a 40 dB allowable-loss budget.