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The Use of Guided Waves for Rapid Screening of Chemical Plant Pipework  

Alleyne, D.N. (Guided Ultrasonics Ltd.)
Pavlakovic, B. (Guided Ultrasonics Ltd.)
Lowe, M.J.S. (Department of Mechanical Engineering, Imperial College)
Cawley, P. (Department of Mechanical Engineering, Imperial College)
Publication Information
Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing / v.22, no.6, 2002 , pp. 589-598 More about this Journal
Abstract
The safe operation of petrochemical plant requires screening of the pipework to ensure that there are no unacceptable levels of corrosion. Unfortunately, each plant has many thousands of metres of pipe, much of which is insulated or inaccessible. Conventional methods such as visual inspection and ultrasonic thickness gauging require access to each point of the pipe which is time consuming and very expensive to achieve. Extensional or torsional ultrasonic guided waves in the pipe wall provide an attractive solution to this problem because they can be excited at one location on the pipe and will propagate many metres along the pipe, returning echoes indicating the presence of corrosion or other pipe features. Guided Ultrasonics Ltd have now commercialised the technique and this paper describes the basis of the method, together with examples of practical test results and typical application areas.
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