Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging Simulation of Leakage in Underground Water Supply Pipeline

Leakage in urban water supply networks leads to substantial water wastage. Detecting such leaks is particularly challenging due to the underground placement of the pipelines. Due to the ability to penetrate the ground surface to achieve high-resolution imaging of underground scenes, L-band airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technology has attracted attention in the industry for leakage detection. In this paper, full-wave electromagnetic simulation software (FEKO) is used to simulate scattered echo data, and a 2D SAR algorithm is used to reconstruct the image of typical buried pipeline leakage scenes. The simulation results show that the backscattering characteristics of wet soil caused by leakage are significantly different from those of dry soil. L-band SAR imaging has great potential for leakage detection.