Monitoring internal corrosion in steel pipelines: a two-step helical guided wave approach for localization and quantification

This article presents a two-step approach for the assessment of internal corrosion in cylindrical structures using helical guided ultrasonic waves. The approach consists of two steps such as (1) localization and (2) estimation of the size of the corroded area. Localization is performed with the algebraic reconstruction technique where the energy ratio of the two fundamental Lamb modes S-0 and A(0) is used as input damage coefficient. Using the output of the localization step, the size of the corroded area is estimated by iteratively solving the eikonal equation using a finite-difference approach. The proposed approach is validated by an accelerated corrosion test. Furthermore, numerical simulations are carried out to study the interaction of the energy ratio and the phase velocity travel time with various thickness profiles acquired from the experiment. The proposed approach is validated against the experimental data up to approximately 50% thickness loss.