A Steady State Methodology for Leak Diagnosis in Multibranched Pipelines

This work proposes a general methodology to deal with the problem of leak diagnosis in a multi-branched pipeline. To achieve this, the flow rate and pressure measurements at the ends of the pipeline are assumed to be known, as well as the flow rate leaving each pipeline branch with a known position. The key of the proposed methodology consists of estimating the known position of each branch of the pipeline and generating a residual from the discrepancy between the estimated and the real position, due to the presence of a leak. Due to the sensitivity of the residuals to variations of flow and pressure, the sign of this set of residuals indicates the section in which the leak is located, and, knowing this, it is possible to localize it precisely through a simple mathematical expression using only known values. In particular, we present the equations for the cases of pipelines with two and three branches.