Reliability evaluation of pipe thickness measurement by electromagnetic acoustic transducer

Abstract

Non-destructive inspection is an important technique in the maintenance of plants and factories. It is necessary to appropriately evaluate the reliability of non-destructive inspection techniques. This study focuses on a reliability evaluation method for nondestructive inspections. The reliability method uses the probability of detection (POD) as a metric. A POD function is determined based on the thicknesses, signal responses, and a decision threshold for all pipe-wall measurements, and can be reasonably modeled by the cumulative log normal distribution function. In this study, the POD is applied to reliability evaluations of an electromagnetic acoustic transducer (EMAT), which is a non-destructive inspection device. Using the results of experimental measurements, we confirm that the POD can evaluate the reliabilities of EMATs that have different specifications.