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The University of Southampton
Engineering

Research project: Corrosion detection in small diameter buried steel gas pipes

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Corrosion is one of the major issues regarding the integrity of assets for a wide range of industries. Currently inspections are conducted at regular intervals to ensure a sufficient integrity level of these assets. Cost reduction while maintaining a high level of reliability and safety of installations is a major challenge. The concept of predictive maintenance using permanent sensors that monitor the integrity of an installation matches very well with the objective to reduce cost while maintaining a high safety level. In recent years, research has focused on finding an effective, rapid, long‐range and low cost method in pipeline inspection. However, there is still a clear need for a sensitive and accurate method which is capable of detecting the location and the size of a defect. Compared with the existing methods, the use of ultrasonic guided waves is an attractive method for the inspection of pipelines. However, there is a clear need to support different pipe sizes over long distances without the need for excavation. In this project, small pipes (with diameters less than 5 cm) are considered due to a request by Scotia Gas Network Ltd.

A 3.4 cm diameter steel pipe with a wall thickness of 0.55 cm containing three different defect sizes has been examined. A defect with 8.3% Cross Section Area (CSA) has been detected by generating a torsional mode T(0,1) at 50 kHz on the pipe. Smaller defects cannot be found due to high reverberation levels in high frequency propagation. This is mainly due to having a limited number of transducers. Further work using more transducers and tests on a buried pipe (to include attenuation) have been carried out and useful results have been obtained.

Associated research themes

Mechatronics, signal processing and control

Related research groups

Acoustics Group
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