Citation

Du G, Kong Q, Zhou H, Gu H. Sensors (Basel) 2017; 17(8): s17081812.

Affiliation

Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204, USA. hgu2@uh.edu.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/s17081812

PMID

28805666

Abstract

Cracks in oil and gas pipelines cause leakage which results in property damage, environmental pollution, and even personal injury or loss of lives. In this paper, an active-sensing approach was conducted to identify the crack damage in pipeline structure using a stress wave propagation approach with piezoceramic transducers. A pipeline segment instrumented with five distributed piezoceramic transducers was used as the testing specimen in this research. Four cracks were artificially cut on the specimen, and each crack had six damage cases corresponding to different crack depths. In this way, cracks at different locations with different damage degrees were simulated. In each damage case, one piezoceramic transducer was used as an actuator to generate a stress wave to propagate along the pipeline specimen, and the other piezoceramic transducers were used as sensors to detect the wave responses. To quantitatively evaluate the crack damage status, a wavelet packet-based damage index matrix was developed. Experimental results show that the proposed method can evaluate the crack severity and estimate the crack location in the pipeline structure based on the proposed damage index matrix. The sensitivity of the proposed method decreases with increasing distance between the crack and the mounted piezoceramic transducers.

Keywords: Pipeline transportation

Language: en

Keywords

multiple cracks detection; piezoceramic transducer; pipeline crack detection; stress wave propagation; structural health monitoring; wavelet packet analysis