Desenvolvimento de um simulador virtual de vazamento para testar correlacionadores acústicos comerciais

• Ano de defesa: 2014
• Autor(a) principal: Lima, Fábio Kroll de [UNESP]
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp)
• Palavras-chave em Português: Água - Vazamento; Simulação (Computadores); Abastecimento de água; Agua - Tubulação; Water leakage
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/11449/123716; http://www.athena.biblioteca.unesp.br/exlibris/bd/cathedra/21-05-2015/000830129.pdf

Leak in pipes is one of the main concerns of water companies due to the scarcity and availability of potable water sources, especially in big cities. The cross-correlation technique has been used in the past 30 years to locate leaks in metallic pipes. Although the cross- correlation method works very well for metallic pipes, it does not have the same effectiveness in plastic pipes. This is mainly due to the high attenuation between the pipe wall and the fluid, which suppress rapidly the leak noise. Hence, leak noise does not travel long distance in such pipes. Moreover, the frequency range over which the leak energy is located, is at low frequency. Hence, the leak signal is easily affected by background noise. To avoid these problems, a band-pass filter is used to suppress undesirable noise before conducting the correlation. The selection of the band-pass filter limits is the key to have a reliable time delay estimate between two leak signals, which is used to calculate the position of a suspected leak. This work concerns the investigation and design of a leak simulator, here named Virtual Pipe Rig, using an analytical leak model together with mechanical actuators (shakers). The analytical model is responsible for generating leak signals used to drive the mechanical actuators, which are responsible for simulating the measure positions. This virtual pipe rig can be used to assess commercial correlators and training purposes. The main advantage of this method is the entire control of the experiment, so that the characteristic of the simulated leak signal is known beforehand