EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS OF GUIDED WAVE TRAVEL TIME TOMOGRAPHY

Corrosion is one of the industries major issues regarding the integrity of assets. Currently inspections are conducted at regular intervals to ensure a sufficient integrity level of these assets. Cost reduction while maintaining a high level of reliability and safety of installations is a major challenge. The concept of predictive maintenance using permanent sensors that monitor the integrity of an installation matches very well with the objective to reduce cost while maintaining a high safety level. Guided waves are very attractive for permanent monitoring systems because they can travel over large distances and therefore provide the essential large area coverage. Making use of the dispersive behavior of the guided waves, a wall thickness map over a distance of several meters can be made using only two rings of guided wave transducers. Travel time tomography is used to translate transmission travel times into a wall thickness map. This method has been applied in the field for the first time to map the wall thickness under two clearly corroded pipe supports of a 8" and 10" gas pipe line. The tomographic inversion results clearly maps the corrosion under the supports. Independent reference measurements confirm the tomographic inversion results.