Pipeline Leakage Detection Using Acoustic Emission and Machine Learning Algorithms

Pipelines play a significant role in liquid and gas resource distribution. Pipeline leaks, however, result in severe consequences, such as wasted resources, risks to community health, distribution downtime, and economic loss. An efficient autonomous leakage detection system is clearly required. The recent leak diagnosis capability of acoustic emission (AE) technology has been well demonstrated. This article proposes a machine learning-based platform for leakage detection for various pinhole-sized leaks using the AE sensor channel information. Statistical measures, such as kurtosis, skewness, mean value, mean square, root mean square (RMS), peak value, standard deviation, entropy, and frequency spectrum features, were extracted from the AE signal as features to train the machine learning models. An adaptive threshold-based sliding window approach was used to retain the properties of both bursts and continuous-type emissions. First, we collected three AE sensor datasets and extracted 11 time domain and 14 frequency domain features for a one-second window for each AE sensor data category. The measurements and their associated statistics were transformed into feature vectors. Subsequently, these feature data were utilized for training and evaluating supervised machine learning models to detect leaks and pinhole-sized leaks. Several widely known classifiers, such as neural networks, decision trees, random forests, and k-nearest neighbors, were evaluated using the four datasets regarding water and gas leakages at different pressures and pinhole leak sizes. We achieved an exceptional overall classification accuracy of 99%, providing reliable and effective results that are suitable for the implementation of the proposed platform.