Leak detection for household pipelines based on a smart valve with single pressure and flow sensors

Household pipelines leaks are a major source of water wastage, and several leak detection techniques have been developed. As a result, manufacturers started to produce smart valves, able to autonomously detect water leaks in house plumbing networks. A smart valve is an electronically controllable valve provided with some sensors, that must be closed if a leak is detected. The valve closure is controlled by an embedded computational unit that analyses the valve sensors data with a Leak Detection system composed by a set of algorithms. This work proposes a Leak Detection system to monitor a household plumbing network both when an house utility is opened and when all utilities are closed, considering a single flow sensor and single pressure sensor in the smart valve. The proposed Leak Detection system consists of three algorithms: (1) an if-then-else construct (2) a fault detection algorithm based on a logistic regression model, and (3) an anomaly detection algorithm based on the multivariate Gaussian distribution. The effectiveness of the Leak Detection system is experimentally evaluated on a laboratory house plumbing network, considering different utilities. Copyright (c) 2024 The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)