Lowe, P., Duan, W., Kanfoud, J. et al. (1 more author) (2017) Structural health monitoring of above-ground storage tank floors by ultrasonic guided wave excitation on the tank wall. Sensors, 17 (11). 2542. ISSN 1424-8220
Abstract
There is an increasing interest in using ultrasonic guided waves to assess the structural degradation of above-ground storage tank floors. This is a non-invasive and economically viable means of assessing structural degradation. Above-ground storage tank floors are ageing assets which need to be inspected periodically to avoid structural failure. At present, normal-stress type transducers are bonded to the tank annular chime to generate a force field in the thickness direction of the floor and excite fundamental symmetric and asymmetric Lamb modes. However, the majority of above-ground storage tanks in use have no annular chime due to a simplified design and/or have a degraded chime due to corrosion. This means that transducers cannot be mounted on the chime to assess structural health according to the present technology, and the market share of structural health monitoring of above-ground storage tank floors using ultrasonic guided wave is thus limited. Therefore, the present study investigates the potential of using the tank wall to bond the transducer instead of the tank annular chime. Both normal and shear type transducers were investigated numerically, and results were validated using a 4.1 m diameter above-ground storage tank. The study results show shear mode type transducers bonded to the tank wall can be used to assess the structural health of the above-ground tank floors using an ultrasonic guided wave. It is also shown that for the cases studied there is a 7.4 dB signal-to-noise ratio improvement at 45 kHz for the guided wave excitation on the tank wall using shear mode transducers.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2017 The Authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | ultrasonic guided waves; above-ground storage tanks; tank floor inspection; numerical simulations; non-destructive testing |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Advanced Manufacturing Institute (Sheffield) > Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 13 Nov 2019 12:04 |
Last Modified: | 16 Nov 2019 08:32 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | MDPI AG |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.3390/s17112542 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:152222 |