ABSTRACT
Leaks of pipeline contribute to the environmental pollution, promote corrosion and
equipment failures and produce instabilities in the pipeline operation and control. The
paper purpose is to develop a mathematical model that accounts for the behavior of
pressure and flow-rate profiles in a pipeline systems and also involves simulation of
pipeline conditions using advanced models which describe the fluid behavior in pipeline
systems. The resulting advanced nonlinear mathematical model provides precise
information on the actual flow and pressure in the whole pipeline system and describes
the behavior of the underlying system. The proposed leak detection and localization
method evaluates the mismatch between actual variables and those of healthy pipeline
to detect leak. The proposed method appears attractive due to its simplicity. The
traditional leak detection and localization methods are very expensive as they require
the measurement of total pipeline flow and other variables at many points and are likely
to produce unsatisfactory results due to ignoring the transient changes in the product
variables.