Research Articles

Journal article

Li Z, Jarvis R, Nagy PB, Dixon S, Cawley Pet al., 2017,

Experimental and simulation methods to study the Magnetic Tomography Method (MTM) for pipe defect detection

, NDT & E INTERNATIONAL, Vol: 92, Pages: 59-66, ISSN: 0963-8695

Journal article

Zou F, Cegla F, 2017,

High Accuracy Ultrasonic Corrosion Rate Monitoring

, Corrosion, Vol: 74, Pages: 2663-2679, ISSN: 0010-9312

Ultrasonic testing with permanently installed transducers is widely used for online corrosion monitoring in the field. In this paper, a carefully optimized ultrasonic corrosion monitoring technique for carrying out measurements in the laboratory is presented. It is shown that for thickness measurements of a 10 mm steel component, a repeatability of ~40 nm can be maintained over the period of a day. The technique has been applied to monitoring the wall losses of a steel sample during forced and unforced corrosion experiments. All ultrasonic wall loss measurements reported have been validated by optical surface profile scans and, where possible, by analytical predictions based on Faraday’s law. Further analysis of the results shows that wall loss rates in the order of 0.1 – 0.2 mm/year can be detected within 1 – 2 hours. This state-of-the-art laboratory technique is highly accurate and responsive, and possesses the potential for becoming a powerful alternative corrosion assessment tool that is convenient to use.

Journal article

Heinlein S, Cawley P, Vogt TK, 2017,

Reflection of torsional T(0,1) guided waves from defects in pipe bends

, NDT and E International, Vol: 93, Pages: 57-63, ISSN: 0963-8695

This paper investigates the reflection of the torsional T(0,1) mode from defects in pipe bends. The effect of varying circumferential and angular position along the pipe bend, as well as the influence of the bend radius, is investigated via 3D finite element simulations. The results show that the reflection expected from a small defect varies significantly with position, the minimum reflection coefficient being about 10% of that from a comparable defect in a straight pipe, while maxima of around four times the straight pipe value are seen. The areas of low detectability are mainly found on the bend intrados and those of high detectability close to its extrados; similar effects are seen in bends with radii varying from one to twenty pipe diameters. It is shown that the reflection from a defect at a given location is roughly proportional to the square of the von Mises stress produced by the transmitted wave at that position. This holds for defects such as circumferential cracks, the detailed subject of this investigation, and is also expected to be valid for corrosion patches; it will not hold for axial cracks. The results explain the low reflection seen from a simulated corrosion defect at a bend in a previous investigation.

Journal article

Corcoran J, 2017,

Rate based structural health monitoring using permanently installed sensors

, Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, Vol: 473, ISSN: 1364-5021

Permanently installed sensors are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, facilitating very frequent in situ measurements and consequently improved monitoring of ‘trends’ in the observed system behaviour. It is proposed that this newly available data may be used to provide prior warning and forecasting of critical events, particularly system failure. Numerous damage mechanisms are examples of positive feedback; they are ‘self-accelerating’ with an increasing rate of damage towards failure. The positive feedback leads to a common time-response behaviour which may be described by an empirical relation allowing prediction of the time to criticality. This study focuses on Structural Health Monitoring of engineering components; failure times are projected well in advance of failure for fatigue, creep crack growth and volumetric creep damage experiments. The proposed methodology provides a widely applicable framework for using newly available near-continuous data from permanently installed sensors to predict time until failure in a range of application areas including engineering, geophysics and medicine.

Journal article

Jones GA, Huthwaite P, 2017,

Limited view X-ray tomography for dimensional measurements

, NDT and E International, Vol: 93, Pages: 98-109, ISSN: 0963-8695

The growing use of complex and irregularly shaped components for safety-critical applications has increasingly led to the adoption of X-ray CT as an NDE inspection tool. Standard X-ray CT methods require thousands of projections, each regularly distributed evenly through 360∘ to produce an accurate image. The time consuming acquisition of thousands of projections can lead to significant bottlenecks. Recent developments in medical imaging driven by both increasing computational power and the desire to reduce patient X-ray exposure have led to the development of a number of limited view CT methodologies. Thus far these limited view algorithms have been applied to basic synthetic data derived from simple medical phantoms. Here, we use experimental data to rigorously test the capability of limited view algorithms to accurately reconstruct and precisely measure the dimensional features of an additive manufactured sample and a turbine blade. Our findings highlight the importance of prior information in producing accurate reconstructions capable of significantly reducing X-ray projections by at least an order of magnitude. In the turbine blade example a dramatic reduction in projections from 5000 to 24 was observed while still demonstrating the same level of accuracy as standard CT methods. The findings of the study also suggest the importance of sample complexity and the presence of sparsity in the X-ray projections in order to maximise the capabilities of these limited algorithms. With the ever increasing computational power limited view CT algorithms offer a method for reducing data acquisition time and alleviating manufacturing throughput bottlenecks without compromising image accuracy and quality.

Journal article

Egerton JS, Lowe MJS, Huthwaite P, Halai HVet al., 2017,

A multiband approach for accurate numerical simulation of frequency dependent ultrasonic wave propagation in the time domain

, JOURNAL OF THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA, Vol: 142, Pages: 1270-1280, ISSN: 0001-4966

Finite element (FE) simulations are popular for studying propagation and scattering of ultrasonic waves in nondestructive evaluation. For a large number of degrees of freedom, time domain FE simulations are much more efficient than the equivalent frequency domain solution. However, unlike frequency domain simulations, time domain simulations are often poor at representing the speed and the attenuation of waves if the material is strongly damping or highly dispersive. Here, the authors demonstrate efficient and accurate representation of propagated and scattered waves, achieved by combining a set of time domain solutions that are obtained for a set of frequency ranges known as bands, such that, in combination, the authors' multiband solution accurately represents the whole wave spectrum. Consequently, high accuracy is achieved, at minor computational cost, using a modest number of bands. The multiband technique is implemented for ultrasonic wave propagation in highly attenuating polyethylene material, using three frequency bands, and can yield a reduction in empirical acoustic properties fractional error compared with respective time domain simulations, in propagation duration, of a factor of 1.4, and in full-width-half-maximum, of a factor of 10. Last, the accuracy of this approach is further exemplified in a wave scattering simulation.

Journal article

Zou F, Cegla, 2017,

High accuracy ultrasonic monitoring of electrochemical processes

, Electrochemistry Communications, Vol: 82, Pages: 134-138, ISSN: 1388-2481

Ultrasonic testing (UT) can be used for non-intrusive corrosion monitoring. In this paper, we firstly show that UT is not only capable of monitoring wall-thickness losses, but can also be exploited for tracking electrodeposition processes. All ultrasonic measurements reported are in agreement with analytical predictions and optical surface profile measurements. Since UT is highly sensitive to the coupling conditions and the relative acoustic properties of substrates and deposited materials, it can become an effective tool for studying the interface phenomena in which dissolution and deposition compete. Examples of these include passivation layer formation and scale deposition which are corrosion-inhibiting electrochemical processes.

Journal article

Howard R, Cegla F, 2017,

Detectability of corrosion damage with circumferential guided waves in reflection and transmission

, NDT & E International, Vol: 91, Pages: 108-119, ISSN: 0963-8695

There is an increasing interest in high frequency short range guided waves to screen or monitor for corrosion. This contrasts with long range guided waves (LRGWs) which screen pipes for large patches of corrosion and have been successfully used in corrosion management for the past twenty years. The fundamental setup described in this paper uses circumferential guided waves, which are excited at a single location on a pipe and travel around the pipe wall and are detected at the same location. The study uses a finite element model assisted method to evaluate the detection capability of two short range circumferential guided wave setups which use both the reflected and transmitted signals. The setups themselves consist of either an axial array of transducers, for monitoring, or a single transducer which axially scans a pipe. Both setups have an array or scan pitch between either adjacent transducers or measurements. The detection capability of the fundamental Lamb wave modes (A0 and S0) in both reflection and transmission have been compared, as well as a hybrid shear horizontal wave setup, which uses the SH0 mode in reflection and the SH1 mode in transmission. A sensitivity analysis was conducted using two separate methods to determine the probability of detection (POD) for either the reflection or transmission signals. Both methods determine a POD for a specific defect, noise level, and array or scan pitch. Probability images are produced which map the POD for a range of defect sizes. For the parameters investigated in this study, it was found that in transmission large diameter defects have a higher detectability, whereas deep, narrow diameter defects are more detectable in reflection. A generalised overview of the sensitivity of short range guided waves is presented by combining both the reflection and transmission PODs. The data fused sensitivity of the S0 and SH hybrid modes are given as 0.6% and 0.75% cross sectional area (CSA) respectively, allowing for the comp

Journal article

Liu Y, Chang L, van Pamel A, Cawley Pet al., 2017,

Feasibility and reliability of grain noise suppression in monitoring of highly scattering materials

, Journal of Nondestructive Evaluation, Vol: 36, ISSN: 1573-4862

A feasibility study on grain noise suppression using baseline subtraction is presented in this paper. Monitoring is usually done with permanently installed transducers but this is not always possible; here instead monitoring is conducted by carrying out repeat C-scans and the feasibility of grain noise suppression by subtracting A-scans extracted from the C-scans is investigated. The success of this technique depends on the ability to reproduce the same conditions for each scan, including a consistent stand-off, angle, and lateral position of the transducer relative to the testpiece. The significance of errors are illustrated and a 3D cross correlation is used which enables the same lateral position to be located within successive C-scans. The experimental results show that a noise reduction of around 15 dB is obtained after baseline subtraction, which will significantly improve the defect detection sensitivity. In practice however, successive C-scans may be conducted at different temperatures and with different transducers of similar specifications but a varying frequency response. Compensation techniques to reduce the impact of such variations are then presented and their effectiveness is verified experimentally. It is shown that it is feasible to obtain an overall improvement of around 10 dB in the signal to noise ratio via baseline subtraction, where a temperature difference of up to 10 ∘C and a peak frequency shift of as much as ±250 kHz from a baseline value of around 7 MHz can be tolerated. However, this improvement was obtained in laboratory conditions with no changes to the surface of the specimen due to oxidation or corrosion. It is shown that differences in temperature and transducer frequency response are more difficult to compensate for than changes in test geometry and position.

Journal article

Shi F, Lowe M, Craster R, 2017,

Diffusely scattered and transmitted elastic waves by random rough solid-solid interfaces using an elastodynamic Kirchhoff approximation

, PHYSICAL REVIEW B, Vol: 95, ISSN: 2469-9950

Elastic waves scattered by random rough interfaces separating two distinct media play an important role in modeling phonon scattering and impact upon thermal transport models, and are also integral to ultrasonic inspection. We introduce theoretical formulas for the diffuse field of elastic waves scattered by, and transmitted across, random rough solid-solid interfaces using the elastodynamic Kirchhoff approximation. The new formulas are validated by comparison with numerical Monte Carlo simulations, for a wide range of roughness (rms σ≤λ/3, correlation length λ0≥ wavelength λ), demonstrating a significant improvement over the widely used small-perturbation approach, which is valid only for surfaces with small rms values. Physical analysis using the theoretical formulas derived here demonstrates that increasing the rms value leads to a considerable change of the scattering patterns for each mode. The roughness has different effects on the reflection and the transmission, with a strong dependence on the material properties. In the special case of a perfect match of the wave speed of the two solid media, the transmission is the same as the case for a flat interface. We pay particular attention to scattering in the specular direction, often used as an observable quantity, in terms of the roughness parameters, showing a peak at an intermediate value of rms; this rms value coincides with that predicted by the Rayleigh parameter.

Journal article

Jarvis R, Cawley P, Nagy P, 2017,

Performance evaluation of a magnetic field measurement NDE technique using a model assisted probability of detection framework

, NDT & E International, Vol: 91, Pages: 61-70, ISSN: 0963-8695

Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) are a powerful tool used to evaluate the performance of NDE methods; however, the need to manufacture and scan many test pieces with realistic defects means that they are expensive and time-consuming to produce. Advances in computational power now mean that it is possible to use numerical models to greatly increase the efficiency of producing ROC for practical applications. A Model Assisted Probability of Detection (MAPOD) framework has been developed to predict the performance of magnetic field measurement NDE techniques. The MAPOD method is used to predict the performance of a promising new technique relying on the deflection of a current injected into a pipe at remote locations, and measurement of the resulting magnetic field perturbations due to defects. A significant proportion of pipes cannot be inspected by pigging methods, and external inspection often requires complete coating removal; therefore, an NDE method that functions outside pipe coatings and cladding is attractive. In this method, changes in the radial and axial components of the field are measured and attributed to defects, but a strong azimuthal component means that misalignment can give significant apparent radial and axial signals due to the azimuthal field apparently having a component in these directions. This requires that the second-order gradient of the magnetic field be measured to maximise sensitivity. Fluctuations in the sensitivity and orientation of the gradiometer during the scan are expected to determine the maximum sensitivity of the technique in most practical applications; however, the flexibility of the framework allows performance to be rapidly predicted and quantified for many test scenarios. Results suggest good detection performance for defects greater than 15% of the wall thickness (T = 7.1 mm) in a 6″ pipe with 2 A (200 A/m2) current injected when measuring above typical insulation thickness (25–50 mm).

Journal article

Corcoran J, Nagy PB, Cawley P, 2017,

Monitoring creep damage at a weld using a potential drop technique

, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRESSURE VESSELS AND PIPING, Vol: 153, Pages: 15-25, ISSN: 0308-0161

Journal article

Egerton JS, Lowe MJS, Huthwaite P, Halai HVet al., 2017,

Ultrasonic attenuation and phase velocity of high-density polyethylene pipe material

, JOURNAL OF THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA, Vol: 141, Pages: 1535-1545, ISSN: 0001-4966

Knowledge of acoustic properties is crucial for ultrasonic or sonic imaging and signal detection in nondestructive evaluation (NDE), medical imaging, and seismology. Accurately and reliably obtaining these is particularly challenging for the NDE of high-density polyethylene (HDPE), such as is used in many water or gas pipes, because the properties vary greatly with frequency, temperature, direction and spatial location. Therefore the work reported here was undertaken in order to establish a basis for such a multiparameter description. The approach is general but the study specifically addresses HDPE and includes measured data values. Applicable to any such multiparameter acoustic properties dataset is a devised regression method that uses a neural network algorithm. This algorithm includes constraints to respect the Kramers-Kronig causality relationship between speed and attenuation of waves in a viscoelastic medium. These constrained acoustic properties are fully described in a multidimensional parameter space to vary with frequency, depth, temperature, and direction. The resulting uncertainties in acoustic properties dependence on the above variables are better than 4% and 2%, respectively, for attenuation and phase velocity and therefore can prevent major defect imaging errors.

Conference paper

Huthwaite P, 2017,

Ultrasonic finite element simulations on GPUs with Pogo

Cite

Journal article

Haith MI, Huthwaite P, Lowe MJS, 2016,

Defect characterisation from limited view pipeline radiography

, NDT & E INTERNATIONAL, Vol: 86, Pages: 186-198, ISSN: 0963-8695

This work presents a method of characterising pipeline defects using a small number of radiographs taken at different angles around the pipe. The method relies on knowledge of the setup geometry and use of multiple images, and does not require calibration objects to be included in the setup. It is aimed at use in situations where access is difficult such as in subsea pipeline inspections. Given a set of radiographs, a background subtraction method is used to extract defects in the images. Using a ray tracing algorithm and knowledge of the experimental setup, the range of possible locations of the defect in 3D space is then calculated. Constraints are applied on potential defect shapes and positions to further refine the defect range. The method is tested on simulated and experimental flat bottomed hole defects and simulated corrosion patch defects with lateral and axial sizes ranging from 12.5 to 33.8 mm and thickness between 3 mm and 16 mm. Results demonstrate a good, consistent ability to calculate lateral and axial defect dimensions to within ±3 mm of the true size. Defect thickness calculations are more difficult and as such errors are more significant. In most cases defect thickness is calculated to within 4 mm of the actual value, often closer. Errors in thickness are due to overestimation, meaning the calculation could be used to place a maximum limit on potential defect size rather than as an actual estimate of the thickness. This would still be useful, for example in deciding whether a defect requires further investigation.

Journal article

Huthwaite P, 2016,

Eliminating incident subtraction in diffraction tomography

, Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, Vol: 472, Pages: 1-25, ISSN: 1364-5021

Diffraction tomography is a powerful algorithm for producing high-resolution quantitative reconstructions across a wide range of applications. A major drawback of the method is that it operates on the scattered field, which cannot generally be directly measured, but must instead be calculated by subtracting the incident field, i.e. the equivalent field with no scatterer present. Unfortunately, often the incident field is not measurable and hence must be estimated, causing errors. This paper highlights an important, but not widely recognized, result: for particular widely used formulations of the algorithm, the subtraction of the incident field is unnecessary, and the algorithm can actually be applied directly to measured signals. The theory behind this is derived, showing that the incident field will vanish under far-field conditions, and the result is demonstrated in practice. Tests with subsampled arrays show that aliasing artefacts can appear, but can be removed with a filter at the expense of resolution. The incident field also has no effect for a variety of array configurations tested. Finally, the performance in the presence of both correlated and uncorrelated errors is confirmed, in all cases demonstrating that the incident field has a negligible effect on the final reconstruction.

Journal article

Huthwaite P, 2016,

Guided wave tomography with an improved scattering model

, Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, Vol: 472, Pages: 1-24, ISSN: 1364-5021

Producing accurate thickness maps of corrosion damage is of great importance for assessing life in the petrochemical industry. Guided wave tomography provides a solution for this, by sending guided waves through the region of interest, then using tomographic imaging techniques to reconstruct the thickness map, importantly eliminating the need to take measurements at all points across the surface. However, to achieve accurate maps, the imaging algorithm must account for the way in which the guided waves interact with corrosion defects, and the complex scattering which occurs. Traditional approaches have exploited the dispersive nature of guided waves: a velocity map is produced from a dataset, then converted to thickness using the dispersion relationship. However, these relationships are derived for plates of constant thickness, which is not the case in the majority of defects, causing significant inaccuracies to exist in the images. This paper develops a more sophisticated inversion solution which accounts for the full-guided wave scattering, enabling more accurate images with resolution better than a wavelength, compared with two wavelengths previously. This is demonstrated with simulated and experimental data. The speed and stability of the algorithm in the presence of random noise and systematic errors is also demonstrated.

Journal article

Haith MI, Ewert U, Hohendorf S, Bellon C, Deresch A, Huthwaite P, Lowe MJS, Zscherpel Uet al., 2016,

Radiographic modelling for NDE of subsea pipelines

, NDT & E INTERNATIONAL, Vol: 86, Pages: 113-122, ISSN: 0963-8695

This work presents an investigation of the accuracy of a radiographic simulation model applied to subsea pipeline inspections. Experimental measurements of a sample in a water tank are used to develop a set of calibrated simulation parameters for the modelling software aRTist. Image quality parameters such as signal-to-noise ratio, contrast and basic spatial resolution are compared with the aim of matching simulated values to experimental results. With this method signal-to-noise ratio was successfully matched while differences were still found in contrast-to-noise ratio comparisons. This means that measurements depending on absolute intensity are not accurate enough, however wall thickness measurements in tangential images, which are not based on absolute intensity, were found to produce similar results in simulated and experimental cases. The differences in contrast and intensity are thought to be due to detector backscatter and additional scatter from out-of-setup objects within the exposure bay, due to a lack of source collimation. These would affect the experimental results but were not included in the simulated setup. This was investigated by including different proportions of peripheral water and other objects in the modelled setup and examining the effect on image quality parameters. Results show that this additional scatter has a significant impact on the radiograph, particularly on image contrast, and is therefore the likely cause of differences between experimental and simulated images. This implies that it will be very difficult to completely match simulated to experimental results, as including all possible scattering objects in the model would be very complex. An improvement could be made by using real subsea data to estimate this additional scattering, which could then be used to calibrate the model. However there would still be significant uncertainty in the ability of the model to accurately produce realistic intensity and contrast.

Journal article

Corcoran J, Nagy PB, 2016,

Compensation of the skin effect in low-frequency potential drop measurements

, Journal of Nondestructive Evaluation, Vol: 35, ISSN: 1573-4862

Potential drop measurements are routinely used in the non-destructive evaluation of component integrity. Potential drop measurements use either direct current (DC) or alternating current (AC), the latter will have superior noise performance due to the ability to perform phase sensitive detection and the reduction of flicker noise. AC measurements are however subject to the skin effect where the current is electromagnetically constricted to the surface of the component. Unfortunately, the skin effect is a function of magnetic permeability, which in ferromagnetic materials is sensitive to a number of parameters including stress and temperature, and consequently in-situ impedance measurements are likely to be unstable. It has been proposed that quasi-DC measurements, which benefit from superior noise performance, but also tend to the skin-effect independent DC measurement, be adopted for in-situ creep measurements for power station components. Unfortunately, the quasi-DC measurement will only tend to the DC distribution and therefore some remnant sensitivity to the skin effect will remain. This paper will present a correction for situations where the remnant sensitivity to the skin effect is not adequately suppressed by using sufficiently low frequency; the application of particular interest being the in-situ monitoring of the creep strain of power station components. The correction uses the measured phase angle to approximate the influence of the skin effect and allow recovery of the DC-asymptotic value of the resistance. The basis of the correction, that potential drop measurements are minimum phase is presented and illustrated on two cases; the creep strain sensor of practical interest and a conducting rod as another common case to illustrate generality. The correction is demonstrated experimentally on a component where the skin effect is manipulated by application of a range of elastic stresses.

Journal article

Seher M, Huthwaite P, Lowe MJS, 2016,

Experimental Studies of the Inspection of Areas With Restricted Access Using A0 Lamb Wave Tomography

, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control, Vol: 63, Pages: 1455-1467, ISSN: 0885-3010

Corrosion damage in inaccessible regions presents a significant challenge to the petrochemical industry, and determining the remaining wall thickness is important to establish the remaining service life. Guided wave tomography is one solution to this and involves transmitting Lamb waves through the area of interest and, subsequently, using the received signals to reconstruct a thickness map of the remaining wall thickness. This avoids the need to access all points on the surface, making the technique well suited to inspection for areas with restricted access. The influence of these areas onto the ability to detect and size surface conditions, such as corrosion damage, using guided wave tomography is assessed. For that, a guided wave tomography system is employed, which is based on low-frequency A0 Lamb waves that are excited and detected with two arrays of electromagnetic acoustic transducers. Two different defect depths are considered with different contrasts relative to the nominal wall thickness, both of which are smoothly varying and well-defined. The influence of areas with restricted surface access, support locations, pipe clamps, and STOPAQ(R) coatings is experimentally tested, and their influence assessed through comparison to a baseline reconstruction without the respective restriction in place, demonstrating only a small influence on the detected value of the remaining wall thickness.

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Ultrasonic finite element simulations on GPUs with Pogo