Ultrasonic defect detection of a petroleum pipeline in a viscoelastic medium

During detection of the defects in the inner wall of a petroleum pipeline via an ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation method, the defect echo and the inner-wall echo often overlap. It is difficult to identify the arriving time of the defect echo. When an ultrasonic wave propagates in a viscoelastic medium, the stress relaxation and creep deformation result in a signal characterized by frequency. The wave speed and attenuation rate are dependent on the frequency; thus, the ultrasonic signal has different shapes along the wave propagation path. Sometimes the wave shape is wry. The empirical mode decomposition technology used for separating the overlapping echo signals has been presented in this paper. With such technology, the original ultrasonic signal can be decomposed and then some intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and a residue can be obtained. Different IMFs contain different echo signals. Some useful IMFs are selected to reconstruct the ultrasonic signal. The peaks of the reconstructed ultrasonic signal envelope indicate the arriving time of the echo signals. The experimental results show that this method is effective for detection of the defects in the inner wall of a petroleum pipeline.