Nondestructive Testing of Nonmetallic Pipelines Using Microwave Reflectometry on an In-Line Inspection Robot

Tobias Carrigan, Benjamin E. Forrest, Hector N. Andem, Kaiyu Gui, Lewis Johnson, James Hibbert, Barry Lennox, Robin Sloan

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    Abstract

    Microwave and millimeter-wave reflectometry, a form of continuous-wave surface penetrating radar, is an emerging nondestructive inspection technique that is suitable for nonmetallic pipelines. This paper shows a K-band microwave reflectometry instrument implemented onto an in-line pipe-crawling robot, which raster-scanned cracks and external wall loss on a high-density polyethylene (HDPE) pipe of diameter 150 mm and wall thickness 9.8 mm. The pipe was scanned with three environments surrounding the pipe that approximated the use cases of overground HDPE pipelines, plastic-lined metal pipes, and undersea HDPE pipelines. The instrument was most sensitive when cracks were oriented parallel to its magnetic (H) plane. Any small variation in the standoff distance between the instrument's probe antenna and the pipe wall, which was not easy to avoid, was found to obscure the image. To mitigate this problem, a sensitivity analysis showed that an optimal frequency can be chosen at which standoff distance can vary by up to ± 0.75 mm within a certain range without distorting the indications of defects on the image.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)1-9
    JournalIEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement
    Early online date18 Jul 2018
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2018

    Keywords

    • Crack detection
    • microwave reflectometry
    • Nondestructive Testing
    • Polarization
    • polyethylene (PE)
    • Pipelines
    • electromagnetic reflection
    • electromagnetic scattering

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