The method for leakage detection of urban natural gas pipeline based on the improved ITA and ALO

To solve the problems of the difficulty in early leakage monitoring and larger positioning error for urban hazardous chemicals pipelines, the optimized method based on the improved Inverse Transient Analysis (ITA) and Ant Lion Optimizer (ALO) was proposed. Firstly, based on the obtained experiment's results of leakage of natural gas in the non-metallic pipeline, the segment classification method was incorporated into the pressure gradient calculation. The modified method can adapt to the multi-node characteristics of urban pipe networks and help to obtain the preliminary positioning calculation results after optimization. Then the calculation results were embedded in the ITA calculation model. The input parameters of the gas pipeline such as boundary conditions, leakage rate and friction coefficient were used to establish the characteristic linear equations. Then the objective function of the least-squares criterion was defined, and the improved ITA model suitable for leakage detection of urban natural gas pipeline networks was constructed. Finally, the ALO was used to optimize the calculation process of the improved ITA model, and iteratively optimize the optimal friction coefficient and its corresponding minimum objective function (OF) value. As a result, a more precise location of the leakage source was calculated. The validation of the modified method is conducted by comparing the calculated values with the experiment's results. The results show that the method can accurately predict the location where the pipeline leakage occurs. The minimum error is 3.17%. Compared with the traditional ITA, this method not only accelerates the convergence speed of the objective function, but also improves the accuracy of location calculation.