Full-waveform inversion for leak localization in water pipe networks

Due to aging without timely renewal, hidden leaks continually occur in urban water supply pipes, which poses serious challenges to water and energy conservation as well as drinking water security. Inspired by echolocating animals, such as bats, that emit calls and use resulting echoes to locate and identify objects, transient waves have been successfully used for localizing leaks in water supply pipes. This talk covers several main aspects of the emerging and promising full-waveform inversion method for leak localization in water pipe networks, including: (1) clarify the physical mechanism of multipath wave propagation in both tree- and loop-type networks; (2) propose an alternative to the classic Tikhonov regularization for ill-conditioned inverse problems; and (3) modify the leak localization algorithm without the strict accessibility requirement of all boundary pipes.