“Clad steel” refers to a thick carbon steel structural plate bonded to a corrosion resistant alloy (CRA) plate, such as stainless steel or titanium, and is widely used in industry to construct pressure vessels. The CRA resists the chemically aggressive environment on the interior, but cannot prevent the development of corrosion losses and cracks that limit the continued safe operation of such vessels. At present there are no practical methods to detect such defects from the exposed outer surface of the thick carbon steel plate, often necessitating removing such vessels from service and inspecting them visually from the interior. In previous research, sponsored by industry to detect and localize damage in pressurized piping systems under operational and environmental changes, we investigated a number of data-driven signal processing methods to extract damage information from ultrasonic guided wave pitch-catch records. We now apply those methods to relatively large clad steel plate specimens. We study a sparse array of wafer-type ultrasonic transducers adhered to the carbon steel surface, attempting to localize mass scatterers grease-coupled to the stainless steel surface. We discuss conditions under which localization is achieved by relatively simple first-arrival methods, and other conditions for which data-driven methods are needed; we also discuss observations of plate-like mode properties implied by these results.
In ultrasonic structural health monitoring (SHM), environmental and operational conditions, especially temperature, can
significantly affect the propagation of ultrasonic waves and thus degrade damage detection. Typically, temperature
effects are compensated using optimal baseline selection (OBS) or optimal signal stretch (OSS). The OSS method
achieves compensation by adjusting phase shifts caused by temperature, but it does not fully compensate phase shifts
and it does not compensate for accompanying signal amplitude changes. In this paper, we develop a new temperature
compensation strategy to address both phase shifts and amplitude changes. In this strategy, OSS is first used to
compensate some of the phase shifts and to quantify the temperature effects by stretching factors. Based on stretching
factors, empirical adjusting factors for a damage indicator are then applied to compensate for the temperature induced
remaining phase shifts and amplitude changes. The empirical adjusting factors can be trained from baseline data with
temperature variations in the absence of incremental damage. We applied this temperature compensation approach to
detect volume loss in a thick wall aluminum tube with multiple damage levels and temperature variations. Our specimen
is a thick-walled short tube, with dimensions closely comparable to the outlet region of a frac iron elbow where flow-induced
erosion produces the volume loss that governs the service life of that component, and our experimental sequence
simulates the erosion process by removing material in small damage steps. Our results show that damage detection is
greatly improved when this new temperature compensation strategy, termed modified-OSS, is implemented.
The pulse-echo method is widely used for plate and pipe thickness measurement. However, the pulse echo method does not work well for detecting localized volumetric loss in thick-wall tubes, as created by erosion damage, when the morphology of volumetric loss is irregular and can reflect ultrasonic pulses away from the transducer, making it difficult to detect an echo. In this paper, we propose a novel method using an inductively coupled transducer to generate longitudinal waves propagating in a thick-wall aluminum tube for the volumetric loss quantification. In the experiment, longitudinal waves exhibit diffraction effects during the propagation which can be explained by the Huygens-Fresnel principle. The diffractive waves are also shown to be significantly delayed by the machined volumetric loss on the inside surface of the thick-wall aluminum tube. It is also shown that the inductively coupled transducers can generate and receive similar ultrasonic waves to those from wired transducers, and the inductively coupled transducers perform as well as the wired transducers in the volumetric loss quantification when other conditions are the same.
Alkali-silica reaction (ASR) is a chemical reaction that can occur between alkaline components in cement paste and reactive forms of silica in susceptible aggregates when sufficient moisture is present. The ASR product, known as ASR gel, can cause expansion and cracking that damages the structure. We pass ultrasonic signals through concrete laboratory specimens and use three different ultrasonic methods to detect the onset of ASR damage, or the presence of ASR damage while still at the microscale. Our test specimens are fabricated with aggregate known to be reactive and are then exposed to an aggressive environment to accelerate ASR development. We use swept-sine excitations and obtain pitch-catch records from specimens that have been exposed to the accelerated environment. From this data, we demonstrate an ultrasonic passband method shows high frequency components diminish faster than low frequency components, and therefore the ultrasonic passband shifts to the low frequency side due to ASR damage. The test results also show that the ultrasonic passband is logically related to specimen size. We also demonstrate a stretching factor method is able to track the progress of ASR damage in concrete very well. These methods are shown to be more reliable than attenuation spectrum or attenuation methods that do not detect the ASR damage in concrete at early stages.
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