Experimental analysis of different optimization techniques on leakage localization using series alignment

Leakage detection and localization system plays crucial role in pipeline technology. Traditionally, negative pressure wave (NPW) based methods have been widely applied for its relatively low construction and maintenance cost. Among these NPW based methods, the slope based method is a major way to estimate leakage position. This paper tries to explore another way in leakage position estimation by aligning two or more NPW signals. In order to provide comprehensive comparison, diverse kinds of optimization methods are used as the optimization engine in searching for the alignment point. Their performance is experimentally compared in multiple NPW alignment tasks to show the strengths and the weaknesses of different kinds optimization algorithms. The experimental results also demonstrate the superiorities of the proposed approach in terms of localization accuracy and algorithm reliability, compared with slope based methods.