Abstract
Cracks, especially small cracks are difficult to be detected in oil and gas transportation pipelines buried underground or covered with layers of material by using the traditional ultrasonic inspection techniques. Therefore, a new composite ultrasonic transducer array with three acoustic beam incidence modes is developed. The space model of the array is also established to obtain the defect reflection point location. And the crack ultrasound image is thus formed through a series of small cubical elements expanded around the point locations by using the projection of binarization values extracted from the received ultrasonic echo signals. Laboratory experiments are performed on a pipeline sample with different types of cracks to verify the effectiveness and performance of the proposed technique. From the image, the presence of small cracks can be clearly observed, in addition to the sizes and orientations of the cracks. The proposed technique can not only inspect common flaws, but also detect cracks with various orientations, which is helpful for defect evaluation in pipeline testing.
Highlights
Pipelines constitute a crucial means for transporting oil and gas
Pipeline cracks lead to leakage accidents and cause considerable losses [1,2,3,4]
Most existing industrial tools that are placed inside pipelines for ultrasonic inspection adopt acoustic beams propagating at normal incidence, which is suitable for inspecting the flaws caused by changes in the pipe wall thickness
Summary
Pipelines constitute a crucial means for transporting oil and gas. Pipeline cracks lead to leakage accidents and cause considerable losses [1,2,3,4]. Most existing industrial tools that are placed inside pipelines for ultrasonic inspection adopt acoustic beams propagating at normal incidence, which is suitable for inspecting the flaws caused by changes in the pipe wall thickness These methods are insensitive to cracks, small cracks. The high cost of equipment and inspection restricts its field applications These imaging methods display only two-dimensional information regarding defects rather than three-dimensional information [21], and two-dimensional information cannot meet the requirements of an accurate quantitative analysis of the spatial distribution of defects. To address these problems, this paper presents a new composite transducer array for ultrasonic inspection of pipelines. The proposed ultrasound imaging method provides three-dimensional information regarding defects, which is convenient for quantization and evaluation of the defects
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