Abstract:The low signaltonoise ratio of leakage vibration signal in watersupply pipelines (WSP) may result in the large leak location error. To address this problem, a leak location method based on the improved empirical wavelet transform (EWT) and crosspower phase difference spectrum is proposed. Firstly, the local minimum of wavelet packet energy spectrum is used to segment the signal spectrum. The signal energy bands of different scales are achieved through wavelet packet decomposition. The distribution of energy value is used to determine spectrum segmentation interval, which solves the spectrum division problem of EWT. Then, the leakage vibroacoustic signal is decomposed into multiple components by EWT according to the spectrum segmentation interval. Effective components can be selected according to the correlation coefficients, and the effective components are bandpass filtered using the frequency band with horizontal variation of the crosspower phase difference spectrum of the effective components. Finally, the leakage can be determined by crosscorrelation timedelay estimation of the filtered effective component signal. Compared with crosscorrelation, variational mode decomposition and crossspectrum analysis, simulation and experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively locate the leak point, and the average relative location error is reduced by 67 times and 15 times respectively.