Guided Shear Horizontal Wave Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducer for In-line Nondestructive Inspection of Pipeline

Pipelines used for transporting natural gas and petroleum fluid are aging and may suffer from accidental damage. The need is growing for an efficient and reliable inspection system to locate and characterize the weak spots that can fail and result in leakage. Magnetic fulx leakage in-line inspection smart Pip-Inspection-Gears and compression wave ultrasonic transmission devices, currently used for detecting metal loss and other defects like Stress Corrosion Cracks have the difficulty of reliably detecting metal loss and other defects like Stress Corrosion Cracks have the difficulty of relably detecting the coincidental metal loss associated with the cup type injurious anomaly. Intelligent Automation, Inc. proposes a novel and integrated approach to inspect the metal loss in the pipelines. It combines the state-of-the-art Shear Horizontal wave EMAT technique, with our record-proven advanced signal processing and pattern classification technique, to detect and characterize the metal loss problem in the underground pipeline transportation infrastructures. The technique has four components: 1) thorough guided wave modal analysis, 2) recently developed threee-dimensional (3-D) Boundary Element Method for best operational condition selection and defect feature extraction, 3) ultrasonic SH wave EMAT sensor design and data collection, and 4) Nonlinear split-spectrum filter, Principal Component Analysis and Learning Vector Quantization for signal-to-noise-ratio enhancement, crack signature extraction, and pattern classification.