Water hammer effect characterization using an acoustic signal processing approach

The paper presents an acoustic signal processing approach for the surveillance of a water pipe and the characterization of the water hammer effect. The experiment is based on ultrasonic transceivers and the validation is made with pressure sensors. The major objective is to quantify the pressure variation into the pipe using a non-intrusive method. Therefore, the speed of the transient was determined making use of the time-of-flight (TOF) which was obtained using the Recurrence Plot Analysis (RPA). Several comparisons between the signal processing approach and the classical techniques highlight the advantage of the non-intrusive method.