Experimental Studies of the Inspection of Areas With Restricted Access Using A0 Lamb Wave Tomography
File(s)
Author(s)
Seher, M
Huthwaite, P
Lowe, MJS
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Corrosion damage in inaccessible regions presents a significant challenge to the petrochemical industry, and determining the remaining wall thickness is important to establish the remaining service life. Guided wave tomography is one solution to this and involves transmitting Lamb waves through the area of interest and, subsequently, using the received signals to reconstruct a thickness map of the remaining wall thickness. This avoids the need to access all points on the surface, making the technique well suited to inspection for areas with restricted access. The influence of these areas onto the ability to detect and size surface conditions, such as corrosion damage, using guided wave tomography is assessed. For that, a guided wave tomography system is employed, which is based on low-frequency A0 Lamb waves that are excited and detected with two arrays of electromagnetic acoustic transducers. Two different defect depths are considered with different contrasts relative to the nominal wall thickness, both of which are smoothly varying and well-defined. The influence of areas with restricted surface access, support locations, pipe clamps, and STOPAQ(R) coatings is experimentally tested, and their influence assessed through comparison to a baseline reconstruction without the respective restriction in place, demonstrating only a small influence on the detected value of the remaining wall thickness.
Date Issued
2016-06-28
Date Acceptance
2016-06-16
Citation
IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control, 2016, 63 (9), pp.1455-1467
ISSN
0885-3010
Publisher
IEEE
Start Page
1455
End Page
1467
Journal / Book Title
IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control
Volume
63
Issue
9
Copyright Statement
© 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Sponsor
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)
Grant Number
EP/H040072/1
EP/020207/1
Subjects
Acoustics
02 Physical Sciences
09 Engineering
Publication Status
Published