Internal Pipe Area Reconstruction as a Tool for Blockage Detection

Abstract

Several pipeline blockage detection methods assume blockages have a regular geometric shape; that is, the blocked section is a pipe of smaller diameter than the original. These methods require a priori knowledge of the number of blockages in the pipeline. Restricting blockages to such special forms also raises identification issues such as nonuniqueness, nonconvergence, and computational inefficiencies. This paper develops a detection method that does not assume regularly shaped blockages and that reconstructs an internal pipe area of unconstrained form. The mathematical and physical bases of the proposed method are described, and a step-by-step solution algorithm is provided. A numerical example of a pipe with irregular blockages is considered to test the performance of the method. It is found that the proposed method accurately identifies multiple blockages of arbitrary shapes and sizes at a relatively low computational cost. The described method is compared with a method for area reconstruction as well as a method for blockage characteristic identification. The proposed method is shown to be more accurate and efficient than the other methods.