Leakage Detection of a Spherical Water Storage Tank in a Chemical Industry Using Acoustic Emissions

Spherical storage tanks are used in various industries to store substances like gasoline, oxygen, waste water, and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). Cracks in the storage tanks are unaccepted defects, as storage tanks can leak or spill the contained substance through these cracks. Leakage from contained hazardous substances storage tanks can contaminate the environment and may lead to fatal accidents. Therefore, the ability to detect cracks from spherical storage tanks is necessary to avoid damage to the environment and to ensure public safety. In this paper, we present a crack detection case study of a spherical tank. The detection was performed using time-domain statistical features and a machine learning algorithm. The proposed method consists of (1) extraction of statistical features from the acoustic emissions (AE) acquired from the spherical tank, and (2) classification of the nonlinear data using a support vector machine (SVM). We evaluate the proposed algorithm with AE data obtained from the spherical tank, demonstrating that the algorithm effectively discriminates between normal and crack conditions. These results show that the proposed algorithm is effective for detecting cracks in spherical storage tanks.