Propagation of Guided Waves in Pressure Vessel and its Application for Damage Detection

Abstract

Pressure vessel is a kind of special equipment with explosion and leakage dangerous. Therefore, structural health monitoring (SHM) techniques for pressure vessel should ensure the safe operation of this kind of equipments and is becoming more crucial in petroleum, chemical, and relative industries. Guided wave-based structural health monitoring technique can be an appropriate method for real-time and online non-destructive damage monitoring technique. In recent years, applications of guided wave-based structural health monitoring techniques are mainly limited in simple structures, such as plates and tubes. Relatively few research papers focused on the application of this technique in large and complex structures like pressure vessels. Propagation characteristics of guided waves in pressure vessel are investigated in this study. Dispersion curves calculated by using numerical methods for longitudinal, circumferential, and torsional modes are presented. On the basis of comprehensive analysis of the guided waves dispersion and experimental waveforms, the parameters of the excitation wave are therefore optimized. In order to overcome the difficulties to identify the damage characteristics of signal, the layout scheme of sensor network is designed and optimized in this paper to simplify the waveform. Furthermore, both finite element analysis (FEA) and experiment methods are employed to investigate the propagation of elastic guided waves in a standard pressure vessel.