A Numerical Study of Axisymmetric Wave Propagation in Buried Fluid-Filled Pipes for Optimizing the Vibro-Acoustic Technique When Locating Gas Pipelines

Abstract

Buried pipeline systems play a vital role in energy storage and transportation, especially for fluid energies like water and gas. The ability to locate buried pipes is of great importance since it is fundamental for leakage detection, pipeline maintenance, and pipeline repair. The vibro-acoustic locating method, as one of the most effective detection technologies, has been studied by many researchers. However, previous studies have mainly focused on vibro-acoustic propagation in buried water pipes. Limited research has been conducted on buried gas pipes. In this paper, the behavior of gas-dominated wave motion will be investigated and compared against water-dominated wave motion by adapting an established analytical model of axisymmetric wave motion in buried fluid-filled pipes. Furthermore, displacement profiles in spatial domain resulting from gas-dominated wave in buried gas pipeline systems will be analyzed, and the effects of pipe material, soil property, as well as mode wave type will be discussed in detail. An effective radiation coefficient (ERC) is proposed to measure the effective radiation ability of gas-dominated wave and water-dominated wave. It is observed that the gas-dominated wave in gas pipes cannot radiate into surrounded soil as effectively as water-dominated wave in water pipes because of the weak coupling between gas and pipe-soil. In this case, gas-dominated wave may not be the best choice as the target wave for locating buried gas pipes. Therefore, the soil displacements result from the shell-dominated wave are also investigated and compared with those from gas-dominated wave. The results show that for buried gas pipes, the soil displacements due to radiation of shell-dominated wave are stronger than gas-dominated wave, which differs from buried water pipe. Hence, an effectively exciting shell-dominated wave is beneficial for generating stronger vibration signals and obtaining the location information. The findings of this study provide theoretical insight for optimizing the current vibro-acoustic method when locating buried gas pipes.

A Comprehensive Review of Acoustic Methods for Locating Underground Pipelines

“…However, the feasibility of this method may be different for various in-pipe medium and pipe materials. Studies on the feasibility of the pipe excitation method in locating buried gas pipe has been conducted in [127]. The numerical results revealed that vibro-acoustic detection may not work well in gas pipe detection because of the weak coupling between gas and pipe wall, making the gas-dominated wave not radiate into the surrounding soil as effectively as the water-dominated wave.…”

Preliminary Acoustic Study of 3D Localization of Buried Polyethylene Pipe

“…Depending on the difference in wave propagation velocity between the pipe and the underground, the pressure waves contribution is more or less attenuated but the shear waves contribution stays high. Moreover, we consider that the pipe is analogous to a cylindrically secondary source which radiates through the heterogeneous ambiant medium to receivers (geophones) [5,6]. To support this assumption, we can observe the experimental measurements presented below (Sect.…”

An Investigation into the Physical Mechanisms of Leak Noise Propagation in Buried Plastic Water Pipes: A Wave Dynamic Stiffness Approach

“…It was found that the surrounding medium effectively adds mass to the pipe wall, whereas the shear properties of the soil effectively add stiffness. The model described in [33] was further adapted by Liu et al [34] to investigate vibro-acoustic propagation in buried gas pipes. They proposed an effective radiation coefficient to measure the radiation of the gas-dominated and shelldominated waves.…”