Pipeline blockage can result in the reduction of system carrying capacity, energy and resource wastage, and potential increase in the probability of occurrence of environmental and health problems. The primary purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a methodology to simulate acoustic wave propagation (AWP) in partially blocked fluid‐filled pipes with flow under different flow velocities. This was achieved by using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software in conjunction with an external user‐defined function (UDF) file, which introduces compressibility effect into the CFD solution. The use of finite element analysis (FEA) to simulate AWP in fluid‐filled pipelines with blockage has been previously reported without flow. In this paper, both CFD and FEA techniques were used to simulate the AWP in air‐filled pipelines without mean flow. However, it is shown that only the CFD technique could be used to simulate the AWP in air‐filled pipelines with mean flow. The secondary purpose of the paper is to use the simulated acoustic waveforms to illustrate a blockage identification procedure for detection, localisation, and sizing of blockages in fluid‐filled pipes using time of flight (ToF) methodology. It is shown that the ToF accurately detects and locates blockages in blocked pipelines. The errors in the localisation of blockages were less than 4%. Furthermore, the effects of blockage size and the mean flow velocity on the AWP characteristics are established. It is shown that both the size of the blockage in a pipe and the mean flow velocity affect the pressure amplitude of the transmitted and reflected waveforms.

中文翻译：

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使用声波传播技术模拟和检测平均流体流量下管道中的堵塞

管道堵塞会导致系统承载能力降低，能源和资源浪费减少，并可能增加发生环境和健康问题的可能性。本文的主要目的是演示一种模拟在不同流速下具有部分流动的部分阻塞的流体填充管道中的声波传播（AWP）的方法。这是通过结合使用计算流体力学（CFD）软件和外部用户定义函数（UDF）文件来实现的，该文件将可压缩性效果引入CFD解决方案中。先前曾报道使用有限元分析（FEA）在充满流体的管道中模拟AWP并发生堵塞。在本文中，CFD和FEA技术都用于模拟无平均流量的充气管道中的AWP。然而，结果表明，只有CFD技术可以用来模拟平均流量的充气管道中的AWP。本文的第二个目的是使用模拟的声波波形来说明通过飞行时间（ToF）方法检测，定位和确定充液管道中的堵塞的堵塞识别程序。结果表明，ToF可以准确地检测并定位阻塞管道中的阻塞。堵塞定位的误差小于4％。此外，建立了阻塞尺寸和平均流速对AWP特性的影响。结果表明，管道堵塞的大小和平均流速都会影响透射和反射波形的压力幅度。