Sensor Placement Strategy to Detect Corrosion in Water Distribution Networks

Water is distributed from sources to meet demands through pipe networks. Pipes are commonly made of metal and buried underground. These pipes can be corroded over time due to the environmental factors. A high level of corrosion on pipes indicates that the pipes in a network should immediately be replaced because they are very susceptible to cause leaks. One way to detect the presence of corrosion in pipes is to observe flows in pipes by installing flow sensors in all pipes. This method enables us to accurately capture corrosion signature at every possible location in a pipeline. However, it is very inefficient to do so due to provision and maintenance costs. We developed a sensor placement strategy to find locations of flow sensors to maximize the sensors functionality to detect pipe corrosion. We used a directed acyclic graph (DAG) to model flow changes due to the presence of corrosion. We apply the procedure to produce DAGs for locations that are susceptible to corrosion. Sensors are placed at locations with the highest detection sensitivity indicated by the intersection of the DAGs. Experimental results indicate that our method can accurately model the corrosion signature and locate strategic sensor locations.