Ultrasonic Monitoring of a Pressurized Pipe in Operation

摘要

Pipes carrying pressurized fluids are an important part of the civil infrastructure, and structural health monitoring (SHM) could ensure structural integrity by predicting and preventing structural failures. Guided wave ultrasonics is a good candidate for use in pipe SHM because guided waves can propagate long distances and are sensitive to structural damage such as cracks and corrosion losses. However, the multi-modal and dispersive characteristics of guided waves make it difficult to interpret their arrival records. Moreover, guided waves are also sensitive to environmental and operational variations, limiting the effectiveness of ultrasonic methods to detect pipe damage in a real environment. We introduce a damage detector based on singular value decomposition (SVD) that can identify a change of interest, caused by a mass scatterer that simulates subtle damage, under realistic environmental variations. We show the effectiveness and robustness of this method on experimental data collected on a pipe segment under realistic environmental and operational variations over a time period of several months.