Detection of abnormal leakage and its location by filtering of sonic signals at petrochemical plant

Gas leakage in an oil refinery causes damage to the environment and unsafe conditions. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a technique that is able to detect the location of the leakage and to filter abnormal gas-leakage signals from normal background noise. In this study, the adaptation filter of the finite impulse response (FIR) least mean squares (LMS) algorithm and a cross-correlation function were used to develop a leakage-predicting program based on LABVIEW. Nitrogen gas at a high pressure of 120 kg/cm² and the assembled equipment were used to perform experiments in a reverberant chamber. Analysis of the data from the experiments performed with various hole sizes, pressures, distances, and frequencies indicated that the background noise occurred primarily at less than 1 kHz and that the leakage signal appeared in a high-frequency region of around 16 kHz. Measurement of the noise sources in an actual oil refinery revealed that the noise frequencies of pumps and compressors, which are two typical background noise sources in a petrochemical plant, were 2 kHz and 4.5 kHz, respectively. The fact that these two signals were separated clearly made it possible to distinguish leakage signals from background noises and, in addition, to detect the location of the leakage.