Abstract: Portable USB acoustic emission device is a new type of acoustic emission testing equipment. This paper describes the principles of using acoustic emission to detect pipeline leaks and the structure and characteristics of the USB AE, analyzes the limitations of the existing USB acoustic emission detection system. Based on the above-mentioned points, we have developed a Portable USB acoustic emission detection system for pipeline leak on Visual Studio C++ 2012 software platform. By pipeline leakage simulation experiments, we verify the system design is feasible. And the system can achieve the acoustic emission signal acquisition, data processing and acoustic source locating functions.