Small Ultrasound-Based Corrosion Sensor for Intraday Corrosion Rate Estimation

Abstract

The conventional way of studying corrosion in marine environments is by installing corrosion coupons. Instead, this paper presents an experimental field study using an unattended corrosion sensor developed on the basis of ultrasound (US) technology to assess the thickness loss caused by general atmospheric corrosion on land close to the sea (coastal region). The system described here uses FPGA, low-power microcontroller, analog front-end devices in the sensor node, and a Beaglebone black wireless board for posting data to a server. The overall system is small, operates at low power, and was deployed at Gran Canaria to detect the thickness loss of an S355 steel sample and consequently estimate the corrosion rate. This experiment aims to demonstrate the system’s viability in marine environments and its potential to monitor corrosion in offshore wind turbines. In a day, the system takes four sets of measurements in 6 hour intervals, and each set consists of 5 consecutive measurements. Over the course of 5 months, the proposed experiment allowed for us to continuously monitor the corrosion rate in an equivalent corrosion process to an average thickness loss rate of 0.134 mm/year.

Review of Non-Destructive Methods for Rock Bolts Condition Evaluation

“…For example, if a transmitter is placed on one surface and a receiver on an opposite surface, the method is called through transmission. However, if both the transmitter and receiver are placed on the same surface or only a single transducer is used to measure the reflected waves, the method is referred to as the pulse-echo technique [12].…”

“…The modern approach to identifying and quantifying the degree of corrosion makes good use of remote data logging techniques. Thibbotuwa et al in 2022 used a batterypowered corrosion monitoring setup that collected data every 6 h (Figure 5) [12]. The setup was installed in Gran Canaria coastal area for about six months.…”

Wireless and battery-operatable IoT platform for cost-effective detection of fouling in industrial equipment

“…Wireless IoT sensing systems have several advantages such as reduced size, easy deployment, self-contained sensor node, while providing same performance as traditional sensing platforms 18 . Low-cost wireless solutions found in the literature are limited either to local measurements of, e.g., wall thickness 19,20 , measurements with the direct propagation paths 21 or impact detection 22 . Such systems are unable to efficiently monitor large structures with sufficient resolution with a reduced number of transducers.…”