Adaptive detection and location for water pipeline leaks in lower SNR and nonstationary environments

An intelligent water pipe leak detection and location instrument is developed based on adaptive filtering methods. To achieve its better performance in lower SNR and nonstationary environments, the paper studies two information processing schemes: bias-free LMS time delay estimation(LMSTDE) and real-time evaluation of the adaptive estimation result by dynamically discriminating the adaptation's convergence. The experiment results show that it can not only improve the adaptive leak detector's sensibility and stability in lower SNR noisy background, but also optimize the pinpointed result and increase its reliability in complicated nonstationary environment.