Hydrate plugging and pipeline leak can impair the normal operation of natural gas pipeline and may lead to serious accidents. Since natural gas pipeline safety monitoring based on active acoustic excitation can detect and locate not only the two abnormal events but also normal components such as valves and pipeline elbows, recognition and classification of these events are of great importance to provide maintenance guidance for the pipeline operators and avoid false alarm. In this article, long short-term memory (LSTM) network is introduced and applied to classify detection signals of hydrate plugging, pipeline leak, and elbow. Adaptive moment estimation (Adam) algorithm is introduced and utilized to accelerate the long short-term memory network convergence in training. Experimental results demonstrate that the network with three layers and 64 units per cell performs the best. The cross-entropy loss in training is 0.0005, and classification accuracies are all 100% in training, validation, and testing which verify the validity of the long short-term memory network. Therefore, the method based on the long short-term memory network and adaptive moment estimation algorithm can work efficiently on pipeline events classification and has great guiding significance for safety assurance of natural gas transmission.
