High accuracy method of ultrasonic gas leak direction detection based on time delay estimation

In order to solve the low accuracy problem in current gas leak detection, a new ultrasonic leak detection method based on time delay estimation (TDE) was proposed. Three ultrasonic sensors arranged in an equilateral triangle and received the ultrasound generated by a gas leak and the leak direction can be determined according to time delays between the outputs of every two sensors. A TDE algorithm based on cubic spline interpolation was adopted to overcome the accuracy limit caused by sampling interval. For each kernel window length, delay estimates of 100 sets of experimental data were obtained and their mean squared errors (MSE) were calculated. Comparison between MSE of experimental data and Cramér-Rao lower bound showed that their changing tendency was accordant. Influences of MSE, the space between sensors and the distance between leak and sensor on direction accuracy were analyzed. Results show that the direction error increases with MSE, decreases with the space between sensors, and increases with distance between leak and sensor. The direction detection accuracy is improved by 7~10 times compared with detection method with single ultrasonic sensor.