Ultrasonic testing of materials: Josef and Herbert Krautkramer Springer-Verlag Publishing Company, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York (1975) 669 pp, $63.00

There has been a large volume of research on structural health monitoring since the 1970s but this research effort has yielded relatively few routine industrial applications. Structural health monitoring can include applications on very different structures with very different requirements; this article splits the subject into four broad categories: rotating machine condition monitoring, global monitoring of large structures (structural identification), large area monitoring where the area covered is part of a larger structure, and local monitoring. The capabilities and potential applications of techniques in each category are discussed. Condition monitoring of rotating machine components is very different to the other categories since it is not strictly concerned with structural health. However, it is often linked with structural health monitoring and is a relatively mature field with many routine applications, so useful lessons can be read across to mainstream structural health monitoring where there ar...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1475921717750047

Structural health monitoring: Closing the gap between research and industrial deployment:

Corrosion and erosion monitoring in plates and pipes using constant group velocity Lamb wave inspection

In this paper, a guided wave tomography method based on full waveform inversion (FWI) is developed for accurate and high-resolution reconstruction of the remaining wall thickness in isotropic plates. The forward model is computed in the frequency domain by solving a full-wave equation in a two-dimensional (2-D) acoustic model, accounting for higher order effects such as diffractions and multiple scattering. Both numerical simulations and experiments were carried out to obtain the signals of a dispersive guided mode propagating through defects. The inversion was based on local optimization of a waveform misfit function between modeled and measured data, and was applied iteratively to discrete frequency components from low to high frequencies. The resulting wave velocity maps were then converted to thickness maps by the dispersion characteristics of selected guided modes. The results suggest that the FWI method is capable to reconstruct the thickness map of a irregularly shaped defect accurately on a 10-mm-thick plate with the thickness error within 0.5 mm.

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Guided Wave Tomography Based on Full Waveform Inversion

One of the largest movers of the world economy is the oil and gas industry. The industry generates billions of barrels of oil to match more than half the world’s energy demands. Production of energ...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1475921719837718

Inspection and monitoring systems subsea pipelines: A review paper:

The transmission of guided ultrasonic waves across corrosion or erosion damage encodes information about the defect depth. Tomography maps the depth profile from multiple transmission experiments performed under different insonification angles by solving the so-called inverse problem; the accuracy of the depth estimation being dependent on the range of angles available for the inversion. Practical application of tomography to tubular structures, such as pipes and bends, requires the use of two ring arrays of ultrasonic transducers at the two ends of the pipe section to be inspected. However, such a configuration leads to an insufficient angular coverage when considering the signals that travel along the shortest temporal path between a pair of transducers. This paper introduces a general inversion method that extends the range of insonification angles by exploiting the information carried by the signals that wrap around the pipe multiple times before reaching the receive array, thus resulting in superior image resolution and increased depth estimation accuracy. In addition, to address typical thermal fluctuations encountered during continuous monitoring, a strategy that combines a temperature compensation scheme with the intrinsic thermal stability of electromagnetic acoustic transducers (EMATs) is developed and tested with full-scale experiments performed on a schedule of 40, 8″ diameter steel pipe instrumented with two ring arrays of EMAT transducers. It is shown that for an irregularly shaped defect the proposed inversion method yields maximum depth estimations that are as accurate as single point ultrasonic thickness gaging measurements and over a wide temperature range up to 175 °C. The results indicate that advanced inversion schemes in combination with EMAT transduction offer great potential for continuously monitoring the progression of corrosion or erosion damage in the oil and gas industry.

Guided wave tomography of pipes with high-order helical modes

Recently, the use of guided wave technology in conjunction with tomographic techniques has provided the possibility of obtaining point-by-point maps of corrosion or erosion depth over the entire volume of a pipeline section between two ring arrays of ultrasonic transducers. However, current research has focused on straight pipes and little work has been done on pipe bends and other curved tubular structures which are also the most susceptible to developing damage. Tomography of curved tubes is challenging because of the complexity and computational cost of the 3-D elastic model required to accurately describe guided wave propagation. Based on the definition of travel-time-preserving orthogonal parametric representations of curved tubes, this paper demonstrates that guided wave propagation and scattering can be approximated by an equivalent 2-D acoustic model which is inhomogeneous and elliptically anisotropic. Numerical methods to solve the full wave equation and predict ray paths and travel times are introduced and applied to the case of a bend. Particular emphasis is given to the shortest-path ray tracing method, which is applied to the 2-D model to compute ray paths and predict travel times of the fundamental flexural mode, A0, propagating across a curved pipe. Good agreement is found between predictions and experiments performed on a 220-mmdiameter (8-in-diameter) (D) pipe with 1.5D bend radius. The 2-D model also reveals the existence of an acoustic lensing effect which leads to a focusing phenomenon also confirmed by the experiments. The computational efficiency of the 2-D model makes it ideally suited for tomographic algorithms.

Acoustic formulation of elastic guided wave propagation and scattering in curved tubular structures

Detection and monitoring of corrosion and erosion damage in pipe bends are open challenges due to the curvature of the elbow, the complex morphology of these defects, and their unpredictable location. Combining model-based inversion with guided ultrasonic waves propagating along the elbow and inside its walls offers the possibility of mapping wall-thickness losses over the entire bend and from a few permanently installed transducers under the realm of guided wave tomography (GWT). This paper provides the experimental demonstration of GWT of pipe bends based on a novel curved ray tomography algorithm and an optimal transducer configuration consisting of two ring arrays mounted at the ends of the elbow and a line of transducers fixed to the outer side of the elbow (extrados). Using realistic, localized corrosion defects, it is shown that detection of both the presence and progression of damage can be achieved with 100% sensitivity regardless of damage position around the bend. Importantly, this is possible for defects as shallow as 0.50% of wall thickness (WT) and for maximum depth increments of just 0.25% WT. However, due to the highly irregular profile of corrosion defects, GWT generally underestimates maximum depth relative to the values obtained from 3-D laser scans of the same defects, leading in many cases to errors between 3% WT and 8% WT.

https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4818&context=qnde

Guided Wave Tomography of Pipe Bends

This paper describes a novel ultrasonic guided wave inspection technique for the monitoring of internal corrosion and erosion in pipes, which exploits the fundamental flexural mode to measure the average wall thickness over the inspection path The inspection frequency is chosen so that the group velocity of the fundamental flexural mode is essentially constant throughout the wall thickness range of interest, while the phase velocity is highly dispersive and changes in a systematic way with varying wall thickness in the pipe Although this approach is somewhat less accurate than the often used transverse resonance methods, it smoothly integrates the wall thickness over the whole propagation length, therefore it is very robust and can tolerate large and uneven thickness variations from point to point The constant group velocity (CGV) method is capable of monitoring the true average of the wall thickness over the inspection length with an accuracy of 1% even in the presence of one order of magnitude larger local variations This method also eliminates spurious variations caused by changing temperature, which can cause fairly large velocity variations, but do not significantly influence the dispersion as measured by the true phase angle in the vicinity of the CGV point The CGV guided wave CEM method was validated in both laboratory and field tests

Geir Instanes

Papers

Corrosion and erosion monitoring in plates and pipes using constant group velocity Lamb wave inspection

Guided wave tomography of pipes with high-order helical modes

Acoustic formulation of elastic guided wave propagation and scattering in curved tubular structures

Guided Wave Tomography of Pipe Bends

Constant group velocity ultrasonic guided wave inspection for corrosion and erosion monitoring in pipes