Study of Composite Pipelines Damaged by Corrosion: Control by Non-Destructive Testing

Abstract

Since the degradation of material properties and defects often occur in engineering structures due to fatigue loading, it is necessary to develop non-destructive testing methods to assess the safety of engineering structures. In the aerospace industry in particular, the demand for early crack detection to ensure the safety and durability of engineered structures is growing. The automated inspection of pipelines using non-destructive testing (NDT) is desirable because visual inspections are not always consistent. In addition, automated inspections reduce the cost of the inspection process and improve its quality. Since the identification of cracks in engineering materials is very valuable for understanding initial and slight changes in the mechanical properties of materials in complex working environments, numerical simulations of propagating Lamb waves in a cracked pipeline were performed to study their non-linear behavior. Finally, the shapes of all the signal responses can be used to identify the depth, length, shape and orientation of cracks. The elapsed time before signal responses are received varies as a function of the orientation of a crack.