DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION OF A LEAK DETECTOR CASE STUDY: PIPELINE PRODUCT AND MARKETING COMPANY (PPMC), ILORIN

Abstract

This project is aimed at designing and construction of a leak detector using ultrasonic principle. The main objective of the project is to maintain the integrity of petroleum products pipeline, in order to ensure safe, efficient and effective transportation of gas and liquid petroleum product to its destination, by providing an affordable method of leak detection. Although the project also finds application in some other areas, but for the purpose of this research, its scope is limited to leak detection in petroleum products pipeline. To achieve the aforementioned aims and objective, the design uses an ultrasonic transducer, a gain amplifier, a tone decoder, a mixer and audio amplifier, a head phone and a 5-DOT LED driver circuit. The ultrasonic transducer is used to transform the ultrasound produced by the leak into electric signal, the gain amplifier amplifies this signal, the tone decoder is used to generate another high frequency signal which is mixed with the signal from the gain amplifier to give a signal with a low frequency considered audible to the human hearing. The audio amplifier further amplifies the mixed signal which drives the output devices (headphone and 5-DOT LED driver circuit) to give both audio and visual output respectively. At the end of this project, the leak detector was able to detect leak as intended, but its sensitivity still needs to be improved, to enable it detect minute fault effectively.