Numerical analysis of the transient pressure damping in a single polymeric pipe with a leak

In recent decades transient test-based techniques (TTBTs) have been used for fault detection in transmission mains. Within TTBTs, the direct transient analysis (DTA) allows the identification of the defects directly by analysing the pressure signal. A possible DTA procedure is based on the analysis of the damping of the pressure peaks. In this paper, it is shown that the pressure decay in a polymeric leaky pipe depends exponentially on leak size and location and the pressure at the leak. It is also shown that, for a given transient, the same damping of the pressure peaks may result from different pipe systems (e.g. with a leak of a different size in a different location).