Methods for Large-Scale Monitoring of District Heating Systems Using Airborne Thermography

Abstract

Abstract-District heating is a common way of providing heat to buildings in urban areas. The heat is carried by hot water or steam and distributed in a network of pipes from a central power plant. It is of great interest to minimize energy losses due to bad pipe insulation or leakages in such district heating networks. As the pipes generally are placed underground, it may be difficult to establish the presence and location of losses and leakages. Towards this end, this work presents methods for largescale monitoring and detection of leakages by means of remote sensing using thermal cameras, so-called airborne thermography. The methods rely on the fact that underground losses in district heating systems lead to increased surface temperatures. The main contribution of this work is methods for automatic analysis of aerial thermal images to localize leaking district heating pipes. Results and experiences from large-scale leakage detection in several cities in Sweden and Norway are presented

Classification of leakage detections acquired by airborne thermography of district heating networks

“…The first system with automatic image analysis was presented by Friman et al [1]. The system uses anomaly detection in order to detect abnormally warm areas along the pipes.…”

“…al [1], and then to classify them as real leakages or false detections. The two subproblems of feature selection and classification methods are both addressed.…”

“…The two subproblems of feature selection and classification methods are both addressed. Moreover, we propose to do the building segmentation differently compared to [1].…”

“…This corresponds to the scheme described in [1], but is included here in order to make the paper self-contained.…”

“…That is, it is an extended object, not just a coordinate. In order to extract the detections from the images, we use the anomaly based method described in [1]. Statistics of the ground temperature inside the pipe mask are calculated from all images within one flight and the most deviating pixels above certain thresholds in the high end of the distribution (i.e.…”