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Water-cooling wall tube leakage accident is an important factor affecting the safe and economic operation of power station boilers. In this article, the acoustic method is applied to locate the leakage from a simulated water-cooling wall tube, and several key technologies are studied in order to identify the precise location of leakage source. Sound wave propagation path in ‘nonuniform temperature field is obtained to overcome the shortcoming that the traditional location technology always assumed that sound waves propagate along the straight line. Considering the refraction effect of sound waves, the reconstruction method based on radial basis function approximation with polynomial reproduction (RBF-PR) is used to reconstruct the temperature field. A generalized cross correlation with second correlation is applied to estimate the time delay of arrival (TDOA). According to the temperature field measured by acoustic method and the propagate time of sound waves, the location fingerprint method including the statistical correlation characteristics between the coordinate of fingerprint points and TDOA are constructed. Radial basis function artificial neural network (RBF ANN) is used to estimate the coordinate of leakage point. Numerical simulations and experimental study are implemented to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed location system. An acoustic location test platform is constructed to study the location accuracy in different working conditions. The results indicate that considering the refraction effect, the reconstruction performance of temperature field is superior than that without the refraction effect, and acoustic method with RBF ANN algorithm can gain the leakage location with high accuracy and good antinoise ability in the above high-quality reconstructed nonuniform temperature distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]