Ultrasonic guided wave propagation in pipes coated with viscoelastic materials

Abstract

This work studies guided wave propagation in pipes coated with thick highly viscoelastic coating materials. The main motivation for this study is the problems associated with Long Range Ultrasonic Testing (LRUT) of coated pipelines. The results reported in the literature show that the proper determination of the optimum LRUT parameters depends strongly on the bulk acoustic properties of the coating materials. The bulk acoustic properties of coating materials reported in the literature show that they could vary significantly depending on the coating material age, temperature and bonding level. The methods for acoustic characterisation of coating materials reported by other researchers, have been studied and it was found that they do not take into account the temperature changes and bonding level variation. In this work, the bulk acoustic properties of two highly viscoelastic bitumen based coating materials are investigated. The conventional methods for acoustic characterisation are studied and a new method for independent measurement of bulk shear properties of bitumen is developed. The bulk acoustic properties of bitumen based coating materials are also studied by two new characterisation methods. The first method derives the bulk coating material properties from experimental data on guided wave reflection coefficients. The second method derives the coating material bulk properties from experimentally measured guided wave attenuation data. It is demonstrated that these new methods deliver much more accurate values for the bulk acoustic properties when compared to the data measured by conventional methods. The second method is used to study the temperature effect on the bulk acoustic properties and it is demonstrated that temperature has a significant effect. The validity of the acoustic properties for the two bitumen materials is investigated through comparison between numerical predictions and experimental data measured for guided wave reflection coefficients and attenuation of the torsional T(0,1) and longitudinal L(0,2) guided wave modes. Good agreement is achieved in the frequency range between 20 kHz and 100 kHz, which is typical for LRUT of pipes.