Extracting Quantitative Information on Pipe Wall Damage in Absence of Clear Signals From Defect

Abstract

It has been well established that guided waves are sensitive to structural damages encountered on their path of propagation and for this reason this technique is very efficient for distinguishing defective structural components from defect-free ones. Although the guided wave technique can identify a specimen having a distribution of defects, detecting and quantifying a small defect on its path from a long distance, as required for structural health monitoring (SHM) applications, is not an easy task for the guided wave inspection technique even today, especially when the transducers cannot come in direct contact with the pipe wall. The current technological challenges for pipe inspection by generating guided waves using noncontact transducers are to detect a small defect on the pipe wall and estimate its location and size from a long distance when the reflected signal from the defect cannot be clearly identified as is the case for low frequency guided waves that can propagate long distances. Electro-magnetic acoustic transducers (EMATs) are used here to generate guided waves in the pipe by the noncontact technique. This paper shows how small a defect in a pipe wall can be detected and its location and dimension can be estimated using relatively low frequency guided waves generated and received by EMATs even when the defect signal is not clearly visible in the time history plot because various wave modes reflected from the defect and pipe ends overlap.