scholarly journals Development of Ultrasonic Guided Wave Transducer for Monitoring of High Temperature Pipelines

Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (24) ◽  
pp. 5443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anurag Dhutti ◽  
Saiful Asmin Tumin ◽  
Wamadeva Balachandran ◽  
Jamil Kanfoud ◽  
Tat-Hean Gan

High-temperature (HT) ultrasonic transducers are of increasing interest for structural health monitoring (SHM) of structures operating in harsh environments. This article focuses on the development of an HT piezoelectric wafer active sensor (HT-PWAS) for SHM of HT pipelines using ultrasonic guided waves. The PWAS was fabricated using Y-cut gallium phosphate (GaPO4) to produce a torsional guided wave mode on pipes operating at temperatures up to 600 °C. A number of confidence-building tests on the PWAS were carried out. HT electromechanical impedance (EMI) spectroscopy was performed to characterise piezoelectric properties at elevated temperatures and over long periods of time (>1000 h). Laser Doppler vibrometry (LDV) was used to verify the modes of vibration. A finite element model of GaPO4 PWAS was developed to model the electromechanical behaviour of the PWAS and the effect of increasing temperatures, and it was validated using EMI and LDV experimental data. This study demonstrates the application of GaPO4 for guided-wave SHM of pipelines and presents a model that can be used to evaluate different transducer designs for HT applications.

2008 ◽  
Vol 130 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Shivaraj ◽  
Krishnan Balasubramaniam ◽  
C. V. Krishnamurthy ◽  
R. Wadhwan

A higher order cylindrically guided ultrasonic wave was used for the detection and sizing of hidden pitting-type corrosion in the hidden crevice regions (between the pipe and the pipe supports) without lifting or disturbing the structural layout arrangement of the pipelines. The higher order circumferential guided waves were generated using a piezoelectric crystal based transducer, located at the accessible top region of the pipes, in a pulse-echo mode. By studying the experimental parameters such as dispersion, particle displacement, and wavelength of the ultrasonic guided wave modes, an appropriate higher order mode was selected for excitation using an appropriately designed acrylic angle wedge that conforms to the pipe’s outer curvature. A manual pipe crawler was designed with a provision for holding the wedge, and the essential hardware such as data acquisition card, encoder, etc., was integrated with the system so that the corrosion was mapped in real time during the scanning of the pipes. The system was validated on pipes ranging from 6in.to24in. outer diameters of wall thicknesses up to 12mm, by mapping defects as small as 1.5mm diameter and 25% penetration wall thickness. A 2D finite element model using ABAQUS® was used to understand the wave propagation in pipe wall and its interaction with pinhole-type defects.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 1377-1392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wentao Wang ◽  
Jerome P Lynch

Osseointegrated prosthesis is essentially a prosthetic fixture surgically implanted into the bone that extends out of the limb so that an artificial limb can be attached. While osseointegrated prostheses can dramatically improve the quality of life of amputees, there remains a lack of quantitative evidence of the osseointegration process that occurs at the bone–prosthesis surface after surgery. This study advances a sensing strategy that employs piezoelectric elements mounted to the percutaneous end of the prosthesis to generate guided waves that propagate along the length of the prosthesis fixture. The properties of the guided waves exhibit sensitivity to both the degree of bone healing that occurs at the prosthesis surface and the movement of the prosthesis due to loss of osseointegration. Use of the prosthesis as a wave guide offers care providers a quantitative approach to determining when an osseointegrated prosthesis can be loaded and tracks the integrity of osseointegration over the lifespan of the amputee. The study validates the proposed guided wave strategy using a prosthesis model consisting of a solid titanium rod implanted in an adult femoral bone. First, a high-fidelity finite element model is created to study changes in guided waves as a result of bone healing. A laboratory model is also adopted using a synthetic femoral bone identical to that modeled in the finite element model. The energy of the first longitudinal wave mode introduced at the percutaneous end of the prosthesis provides a repeatable metric for accurate assessment of both osseointegration and prosthesis pullout from the bone. The results of this study reveal that the energy of the longitudinal wave mode decreases by nearly half during the osseointegration healing process. In addition, the wave energy is also found to increase as the osseointegrated fixture loosens and is withdrawn from the bone.


Author(s):  
Yiran Tian ◽  
Yanfeng Shen

In this study, a kind of meta-surface was designed for the improvement of nonlinear ultrasonic guided wave detection by creating bandgaps. It is composed of aluminum alloy cylinders arranged in a periodic pattern bounded on an aluminum plate. By artificially adjusting the height of the cylinders, the meta-surface can open up bandgaps over desired frequency ranges. Guided waves within the bandgap cannot propagate through the meta-surface and will be mechanically filtered out. To perform non-destructive evaluation (NDE) of structural components with fatigue cracks, the guided waves generated by a piezoelectric wafer active sensor (PWAS) propagate into the structure, interact with the crack, acquire nonlinear features, and are picked up by the receiver PWAS. In an ideal case, the waves excited by the transmitter PWAS should only contain signals at the fundamental frequency. However, due to the inherent nonlinearity of the electronic instrument, the generated signals are often mixed with weak superharmonic components. And these inherent higher harmonic signals will adversely affect the identifiability of nonlinear characteristics in the sensing signals. The bandgap mechanism and the wave vector dispersion relationship of the meta-surface are investigated using the modal analysis of a finite element model (FEM) by treating a unit structural cell with the Bloch-Floquet boundary condition. In this way, the meta-surface is carefully designed to obtain bandgaps at the desired frequency ranges. Then, a FEM harmonic analysis of a chain of unit cells is performed to further explore the bandgap efficiency. Finally, a coupled field transient dynamic FEM is constructed to simulate the improved nonlinear ultrasonic guided wave active sensing procedure with the bandgap meta-surface. The proposed method possesses great potential for future SHM and NDE applications.


2006 ◽  
Vol 321-323 ◽  
pp. 804-807 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ik Keun Park ◽  
Hyun Mook Kim ◽  
Yong Kwon Kim ◽  
Yong Sang Cho

For efficient NDE of pipes, essential components of power plant facilities, ultrasonic guided waves were generated and received applying an air-coupled transducer and comb one as non-contact technology. Mode generation and selection were predicted based on theoretical dispersive curve and the element space of a comb transducer. In addition, a receiving angle of the air-coupled transducer was determined to acquire the predicted modes by theoretical phase velocity of each mode. Theoretical dispersive curve was compared with the results of the time-frequency spectroscopes based on the wavelet transform and 2D-FFT to identify the characteristics of the received mode. The received modes show a good agreement with the predicted ones.


Author(s):  
Kuan Ye ◽  
Kai Zhou ◽  
Ren Zhigang ◽  
Ruizhe Zhang ◽  
Chunsheng Li ◽  
...  

The power transmission tower’s ground electrode defect will affect its normal current dispersion function and threaten the power system’s safe and stable operation and even personal safety. Aiming at the problem that the buried grounding grid is difficult to be detected, this paper proposes a method for identifying the ground electrode defects of transmission towers based on single-side multi-point excited ultrasonic guided waves. The geometric model, ultrasonic excitation model, and physical model are established, and the feasibility of ultrasonic guided wave detection is verified through the simulation and experiment. In actual inspection, it is equally important to determine the specific location of the defect. Therefore, a multi-point excitation method is proposed to determine the defect’s actual position by combining the ultrasonic guided wave signals at different excitation positions. Besides, the precise quantification of flat steel grounding electrode defects is achieved through the feature extraction-neural network method. Field test results show that, compared with the commercial double-sided excitation transducer, the single-sided excitation transducer proposed in this paper has a lower defect quantization error in defect quantification. The average quantization error is reduced by approximately 76%.


2013 ◽  
Vol 113 (14) ◽  
pp. 144904 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pasi Karppinen ◽  
Ari Salmi ◽  
Petro Moilanen ◽  
Timo Karppinen ◽  
Zuomin Zhao ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 1071
Author(s):  
Davide Bombarda ◽  
Giorgio Matteo Vitetta ◽  
Giovanni Ferrante

Rail tracks undergo massive stresses that can affect their structural integrity and produce rail breakage. The last phenomenon represents a serious concern for railway management authorities, since it may cause derailments and, consequently, losses of rolling stock material and lives. Therefore, the activities of track maintenance and inspection are of paramount importance. In recent years, the use of various technologies for monitoring rails and the detection of their defects has been investigated; however, despite the important progresses in this field, substantial research efforts are still required to achieve higher scanning speeds and improve the reliability of diagnostic procedures. It is expected that, in the near future, an important role in track maintenance and inspection will be played by the ultrasonic guided wave technology. In this manuscript, its use in rail track monitoring is investigated in detail; moreover, both of the main strategies investigated in the technical literature are taken into consideration. The first strategy consists of the installation of the monitoring instrumentation on board a moving test vehicle that scans the track below while running. The second strategy, instead, is based on distributing the instrumentation throughout the entire rail network, so that continuous monitoring in quasi-real-time can be obtained. In our analysis of the proposed solutions, the prototypes and the employed methods are described.


Author(s):  
Z Abbasi ◽  
F Honarvar

In recent years, Higher Order Modes Cluster (HOMC) guided waves have been considered for ultrasonic testing of plates and pipes. HOMC guided waves consist of higher order Lamb wave modes that travel together as a single nondispersive wave packet. The objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of frequency-thickness value on the contribution of Lamb wave modes in an HOMC guided wave. This is an important issue that has not been thoroughly investigated before. The contribution of each Lamb wave mode in an HOMC guided wave is studied by using a two-dimensional finite element model. The level of contribution of various Lamb wave modes to the wave cluster is verified by using a 2D FFT analysis. The results show that by increasing the frequency-thickness value, the order of contributing modes in the HOMC wave packet increases. The number of modes that comprise a cluster also increases up to a specific frequency-thickness value and then it starts to decrease. Plotting of the cross-sectional displacement patterns along the HOMC guided wave paths confirms the shifting of dominant modes from lower to higher order modes with increase of frequency-thickness value. Experimental measurements conducted on a mild steel plate are used to verify the finite element simulations. The experimental results are found to be in good agreement with simulations and confirm the changes observed in the level of contribution of Lamb wave modes in a wave cluster by changing the frequency-thickness value.


Author(s):  
Zhanjun Feng ◽  
Weibin Wang ◽  
Wenqiang Tong ◽  
Keyi Yuan ◽  
Zandong Han ◽  
...  

Large storage tanks for oil storage are widely used in petrochemical industry. Corrosion in the tank floor and wall is a serious threat for environmental and economic safety. Owing to their unique potential for long-range, in-plane propagation through plates, Ultrasonic Guided Waves (UGW) offer an obvious solution in the development of an on-board structural health-monitoring (SHM) system, providing assessment of structural integrity for storage tank floor and wall defect in-situ inspection. This paper presents this application by focusing on their propagation through the plate structure. Even very small mechanical discontinuity or geometry change of plate structure, e.g. corrosion defect on tank floor, will influence the propagation characteristic of the guided waves. These effects are measured as mode changes, frequency shifts or filtering, reflection and diffraction of new ultrasonic modes or overall distortion of the original ultrasonic signals. By capturing and analyzing these changes we can deduct the corrosion defect of the tank floor and wall which causes the ultrasonic signal change and interactions. The T/R transducers are required to be attached on the outer edge of the tank floor and outer surface of the tank wall. The technique is developed based on the Lamb wave transmission tomography. Starting from the dispersion curve and choosing the appropriate wave mode, the propagation of the guided waves in the tank floor and wall has been carried out through numerical simulation and the experiment has been conducted for verification using the full-size oil storage tank. The low frequency guided waves can propagate longer distance in planar and tubular structures. The later has been already used in pipeline inspection. The complexity of the application of ultrasonic guided wave in tank floor inspection lies in the object containing multiple lap joint welds along the large diameter of the tank (up to 100 m) and the complicated reconstruction of the two-dimensional defect distribution information. The main scope of the investigation was the application of the ultrasonic transmission tomography for localization of non-uniformities of inside tank floor, taking into account ultrasonic signal losses due to the loading with oil on the top and ground support at the bottom for the tank floor, and the loading with oil inside for the vertical tank wall.


Abstract. Micro-damages such as pores, closed delamination/debonding and fiber/matrix cracks in carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) are vital factors towards the performance of composite structures, which could collapse if defects are not detected in advance. Nonlinear ultrasonic technologies, especially ones involving guided waves, have drawn increasing attention for their better sensitivity to early damages than linear acoustic ones. The combination of nonlinear acoustics and guided waves technique can promisingly provide considerable accuracy and efficiency for damage assessment and materials characterization. Herein, numerical simulations in terms of finite element method are conducted to investigate the feasibility of micro-damage detection in multi-layered CFRP plates using the second harmonic generation (SHG) of asymmetric Lamb guided wave mode. Contact acoustic nonlinearity (CAN) is introduced into the constitutive model of micro-damages in composites, which leads to the distinct SHG compared with material nonlinearity. The results suggest that the generated second order harmonics due to CAN could be received and adopted for early damage evaluation without matching the phase of the primary waves.


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