Experimental verification of the accuracy and robustness of Area Reconstruction Method for Pressurized Water Pipe System

In a previous paper, the authors proposed a transient-based area reconstruction method to identify multiple blockages in pipe systems without prior knowledge of their geometry and number, resulting in very accurate numerical results. In this paper, the accuracy and robustness of the method is verified in a real laboratory system in which the experimental setup considers mild (≈35% reduction in area) and severe (≈85% reduction in area) blockage cases. It is found that both blockage cases can be successfully identified; however, there are some differences between the actual and estimated pipe areas. These differences are shown to be mainly due to the limited frequency bandwidth (FBW) of the generated transient wave, causing three major errors: (1) distortion of the image of the step changes in area, (2) uneven distortion of the image of the two sharp changes of the area, and (3) underestimation of the blockage severity. These limitations and errors are discussed in detail in the paper.