A Novel PPA Method for Fluid Pipeline Leak Detection Based on OPELM and Bidirectional LSTM

Pipeline leak detection has attracted great research interests for years in the energy industry. Continuous pressure monitoring is one of the most straightforward approaches in leak detection which utilizes pressure point analysis (PPA) algorithms to exploit the transient pressure characteristics and identify leak events. However, a critical issue that jeopardizes the deployment of PPA based methods is the high false alarm rate. In this paper, a novel PPA based leak detection method is proposed which can accurately detect the leak events and dramatically decrease the number of false alarms compared to existing methods. Firstly, the proposed method takes advantage of the good approximation ability and fast learning speed of optimally-pruned extreme learning machine (OPELM) to produce a preliminary leak detection result. Then, the strong memorizing ability of bidirectional long-short term memory (BiLSTM) network is exploited to identify the true positive from the preliminary detection result, hence significantly decrease the number of false alarms. Furthermore, a feature extraction mechanism is also proposed to obtain both the dynamic and static characteristics from raw pressure wave. Experiments and verifications are performed on different real world data sets obtained from pipeline leak tests. It shows that the proposed method can achieve higher detection accuracy with significantly less false alarms. It enhances the practicality of pressure monitoring based leak detection schemes.