Guided Waves Tomography and Image Fusion for Damage Identification in Pipes

Abstract

The detection of localized defects such as cracks and corrosion in pipes using guided waves has been shown to be an effective nondestructive evaluation technique for structural health monitoring (SHM). Cross borehole tomography in seismology is introduced into the guided wave inspection of a pipe when the pipe is considered as an unwrapped plate. Guided waves propagating in pipe with a crack defect are simulated using the finite element model and the arrival times for the fastest modes are extracted and sent to the tomographic algorithm. The tomographic reconstruction is based on the simultaneous iterative reconstruction technique (SIRT). For some cylindrical shell geometries such as stacked storage tanks, access to the entire circumference of the structure could be impractical or even impossible, three different image fusion techniques are used to enhance the image equality reconstructed from the incomplete datasets. The results show that the defect is more pronounced after imaging fusion.