Measurement of Valve Leakage Rate using Acoustic Emission

Watit Kaewwaewnoi*, Asa Prateepasen**, Pakorn Kaewtrakulpong*

*Department of Instrumentation and Control System Engineering **Department of Production Engineering King Mongkuts University of Technology Thonburi Email: kwatit007@yahoo.com, iasaasen@kmutt.ac.th and pakorn.kae@kmutt.ac.th the gas leakage through a ball valve in frequency domain. As a consequence, the correlation between the AE and the leakage rate was presented. Dickey et al [4] found that the peak amplitude of AE signal in frequency domain is independent of leak part or leakage rate but dependent on transducer response and valve geometry. However, they did not describe the relationship between AE parameters and valve leakage rate which is the primary basis for predicting leakage rate by AE method. The primary objective of this paper is to present the relationship between AE parameters and the leakage rate of valve at various valve sizes and inlet pressures. The equation utilized to find out the leakage rate at different valve sizes and inlet pressures was also established. 2. THEORY 2.1. Acoustic Emission Acoustic emission (AE) is an energy emitted in the form of transient elastic wave or sound wave within material. The AE signal is obtained using AE equipment after the sound wave has been detected and processed electrically. Generally, the AE signal has a wide frequency range of 25 kHz to 3 MHz. However, it is normally analyzed and processed in the frequency range between 100 kHz to 1 MHz due to high sensitivity. Source mechanisms of AE signal have been classified into two classes. One is called the classical sources which are originated from its macro (such as deformation or crack) and micro structures (such as slip, and twinning etc.). The other is called pseudo sources that do not release the AE directly within the material, but from external mechanisms, for instance, friction from rotating bearing and leakage of gas or liquid [5]. In this paper, AE signal is generated by a pseudo source received from gas leakage through poorly seated ball valves of three different sizes. The type of this AE signal is a continuous AE signal since the beginning and the end of the signal (in time domain) cannot be identified. 2.2. Leakage Mechanism The basic mechanism generating AE signals in a leaking valve is the decay of turbulence resulting from the high pressure, high velocity of fluid flow. The degree of turbulence is predicted by the Reynolds number (R) defined as [3]

ABSTRACT This paper presents a novel method to measure leakage rate of gas through valve using Acoustic Emission (AE) technique. A set of various sizes of ball valve, varied from one to three inches, was tested with a range of valve-inlet pressure. Leakage rate through valve was carried out by calculating the pressure difference in a chamber. An AE sensor was mounted on the case of the valve to capture the AE signal. The AE signal was then amplified and filtered and fed into a Vector Signal Analyzer, model HP 89410A. The sampling rate of the analyzer was set at 10 MHz. AE parameters which correlated with leakage rate were identified. AE average signal level (ASL) and AE root mean square (AErms) exhibited high correlation with the leakage rate. Finally an equation to relate the detected AE signal to the leakage rate at different valve-inlet pressures and valve sizes was established. Keywords: Valve Leakage, Leakage Rate Measurement, Acoustic Emission 1. INTRODUCTION Leakage of valve in industry such as refineries, petrochemical and nueclear plant causes high expense in a large sum annually. In general, valve leakage detecting using hydrostatic or pneumatic test, which may require partly or totally shutdown, is normally applied and most plants decide to schedule the valve checking annually. However, the leakages may occur before the maintenance which could cost a huge lost due to contamination and lowering the efficiency of the instrument and system. Acoustic Emission (AE) is a Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) method utilized in a wide variety of applications. This method was well accepted and commonly found in industries because of its simplicity and convenience to use. In the last decade, the attempt to implement an AE system to detect valve leakage was studied and developed by many researchers. Bezn [1] and Joon-Hyun Lee et al [2] suggested that AErms could be used to determinate the open and close positions of valves, such as relief and safety valves, and also to indicate aging and degradation of check valves in nuclear power plants. Pollock et al [3] studied the characteristic of acoustic leak signals owing to

R=

(1)

where is the density, the flow velocity, r the radius of flow path and the viscosity. It has been found that the onset of turbulence occurs when the Reynolds number is between 1,000 and 10,000 giving leakage produce an acoustic emission. The actual detection of the leakage depends on the flow rate as this factor decides the energy contents of the leak signal. Then, a volumetric flow rate (V) can be calculated by Poiseuille formula which can be written as [3]

Emission activity is attributed to rapid releases of energy in the material, the energy content of the acoustic emission signal is related to this energy release. AErms can be defined as

1 AErms = T

t0 +T

t0

v 2 (t )dt =

1 N

v
n =1

(n) (3)

V =

pr 4 8 L

where v is the voltage signal from an AE sensor, t0 the initial time, T the integration time of the signal, and N the number of discrete AE data within the interval T. Another AE parameter which is often used is the Average Signal Level (ASL) defined as

(2)

where p is the differential pressure across the leakage area which has length L and radius r. The AE signal of leaking valve is more obviously identified on the downstream side of a valve. This is due to the turbulence created when the gas flows from the high pressure side, through the leakage area to the low pressure side. Hence, AE sensors should be located at the downstream side of the valves [5]. The best mounting position of AE sensor on a valve is shown in Fig. 1.

ASLv =

1 T

( t0 +T )

t0

v(t )dt =

1 N

v ( n)
n =1

(4)

ASLdB = 20 log

ASLv 1

(5)

where ASLv is an average signal level in volts and ASLdB an average signal level in decibel (dB). 3. EXPERIMENTAL SET-UP The experimental set-up is illustrated in Fig. 2. Three sizes of the ball valve which are 1, 2 and 3 inches in diameter were used in our experiment. Air was selected instead of gas due to its ease of use and safety. The level of the inlet pressure was supplied by an air compressor and controlled by a regulator. A pressure gauge with a resolution of 0.5 bar with an air filter was connected to a pipe. The size of the pipe was also changed to fit with the size of each valve. The valve inlet pressure was varied from 1 to 5 bars with an increment of 2 bars. As mentioned earlier, the volumetric flow rate can be computed using the equation (2). However, to simplify the measurement of the leakage rate, a known-volume chamber was connected to the end of the valve. The leakage rate can be calculated from differential pressure of the chamber from the equation [7]

Fig. 1: The best position of AE sensor on valves. 2.3. AE System and Parameters Typical AE system comprises of several AE electronic modules such as AE sensors, preamplifiers, filters, amplifiers, and a data acquisition system [6]. AE sensors are generally piezoelectric (PZT) devices that transform elastic waves into electrical signals. To obtain the best leakage measurement system, appropriate signal conditioning and processing is required. Furthermore, signal to noise ratio and suitable AE parameters need to be prudently considered. A proper AE sensor must to be appropriately selected to receive the highest sensitivity. The suitable preamplifier level is based on signal source level and the saturation limits of the AE system. In order to eliminate back ground noise, a band-pass filter operated in the range of 100 kHz to 400 kHz [3] is normally used. For continuous AE signal, the most frequently used AE parameters are the average energy (AErms) and the Average Signal Level (ASL). The AErms is the root mean square value of the AE signal. Since Acoustic

Q =V

(P / P1 ) T

(6)

where Q is the leakage rate (ml/sec), V the volume of the chamber, T the time span of the testing, P the pressure increased over the time T, and P1 the system pressure. A wide band AE sensor of type WD was initially selected to investigate the frequency contents of the AE signal. It was found that, in the frequency domain, the spectrum of AE leak signal showed an outstanding peak at the frequency range of 100-200 kHz. Hereafter, an AE sensor of type R15 which has the resonant frequency at 150 kHz was chosen instead of the model WD in order to enhance the sensitivity of leakage detection. The electrical signal obtained from the R15 was then amplified by an amplifier with a gain of 60 dB. A band pass filter with a pass band ranging from 100 to 300 kHz was integrated to the preamplifier to remove electrical

and mechanical noises. Then the signal was sent to a real time signal analyzer, LOCAN 320 and a Hewlett Packard Vector Signal Analyzer, HP 89410A. The main gain of LOCAN 320 was set at 20 dB and the sampling rate of HP 89410A is set at 10 MHz. The time domain signal contains 978-line in a period of 381.25 sec whereas the frequency domain contains 401-line AErms spectrum spanning from 0 to 1 MHz. The result was recorded using the average value over 500 consecutive spectra in the frequency domain. The data in both time and frequency domains was kept and used to calculate AErms and ASL. Fig. 3: Typical AE signal in time domain

Fig. 2: The schematic diagram of experimental set-up. 4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION The typical AE signal in time domain received from the AE sensor, model R15, is shown in Fig. 3. It is clearly a signal of continuous type. The spectra in the frequency domain of various leakage rates are presented in Fig. 4. It was found that the amplitude of the signal increased with the leakage rate. These results affirmed the ability of AE approach to detect the leakage in valves. The correlation between AE parameters and the leakage rate was also studied. The relation between the leakage rate (ml/sec) and AErms (mV) of the valve size of 1 inch at three different pressures is shown in Fig. 5. The AErms rapidly increases at low leakage rates and then slow down at high rates. The AErms also increases with pressure. The relation between the leakage rate and ASL is depicted in Fig.6 exhibiting the same trend. In addition, the results (not shown here due to limited space) provided similar trend for the valves of size 2 and 3 inches. It can be explained that the flow velocity of leak air increase with value inlet pressure. Consequently the Reynolds number is also increased as shown in equation (1). This causes the turbulence flow which is the source of Acoustic Emission wave. Fig. 4: Frequency spectrum of AE signal at different leakage rates.

Fig. 5: Relationship between AErms and leakage rates of 1 inch ball valve at different pressures.

Fig. 6: Relationship between ASL and leakage rates of 1 inch ball valve at different pressures. The relationship between AE parameters (AErms and ASL) and the leakage rate of different valve sizes are

illustrated in Fig. 7 and Fig. 8 respectively. Analogous experiments using inlet pressures at 1 and 3 bars also revealed similar correlation; however, AE signal reduced with the size of valve. The same reason as mentioned above, the flow velocity reduces with the increase in size of the value.

5. CONCLUSIONS In this paper, a novel leakage measurement system using AE inspection was presented. Analyzing the AE signal generated from the leakage allowed us to choose proper AE sensors, filtering methods and to improve the signal to noise ratio. An AE sensor with resonant frequency of 150 kHz was selected since its frequency response covered the frequency range of the leakage. A number of experiments were conducted to demonstrate the ability to use AE parameters in detecting leakage rate of different valve sizes and inlet pressures. It was found that the AE activities increased with the leakage rate, the inlet pressure but diminished with the valve size. An expression to explain the relationship between these parameters was also introduced in this work. Finally, it can be concluded that the AE technique can be used to detect valve leakage at high sensitivity. 6. REFERENCES [1] A.E.G. Benz, Use of Acoustic Emission Techniques for Detection of Discontinuities, Material Evaluation, Vol. 5, No. 10, pp. 1215-1222, 1998. [2] J.H. Lee, M.R. Lee, J.T. Kim and J.S. Kim, Analysis of Acoustic Emission Signals for Condition Monitoring of Check Valve at Nuclear Power Plants, Key Engineering Materials, Vol. 270273, pp. 531-536, 2004. [3] A.A. Pollock and S.Y.S. Hsu, Leak Detection Using Acoustic Emission, Journal of Acoustic Emission, Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 237-243, 1982. [4] J. Dickey, J. Dimmick, and P.M. Moore, Acoustic Measurement of Valve Leakage Rates, Material Evaluation, Vol. 36, pp. 67-77, 1978. [5] R.K. Miller and P. McIntire, Nondestructive Testing Handbook, vol.5, Acoustic Emission Testing, American Society for Nondestructive Testing, Inc., 2nd ed, Columbus, Ohio, 1987, pp. 12, 541. [6] The American Society for Testing and Materials, Annual Book of ASTM Standards; Volume 03.03, Standard E750-88 Standard Practice for Characterizing Acoustic emission Instrument, Philadelphia, PA, 1993. [7] R.A. Jensen and A.M. Agnone, A New Method to Leak Test Piping Joints, Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering, Vol. 118, pp. 604-609, 1996.

Fig. 7: Relationship between AErms and leakage rates of different valve sizes at P = 5 bar.

Fig. 8: Relationship between ASL and leakage rates of different valve sizes at P = 5 bar. It can be concluded that the important parameters which effect AE signal are valve inlet pressure, valve size and the leakage rate. In order to implement an AE inspection system to measure the leakage rate, an equation to determine the leakage rate by AE parameters was established as
log(Q ) = 11.627log( ASL) - 0.335log( P) + 0.973log( S ) 20.814 (7 ) and log(Q ) = 1.782 log( AErms ) 0.543 log( P) + 0.320 log( S ) 3.440 (8) where Q is the leakage rate in ml/sec, P the inlet pressure in bars and S the valve size in inches. From equation (7), the error rate of prediction is between 9.2 and 29.7% for the range of the leakage rate from 40 to 100 ml/sec and equation (8) is between 8.13 and 59.652% at the same range.