Lamb wave tomography of pipe-like structures

Lamb waves are guided ultrasonic plate waves that can follow the curvature of pipe-like structures. By transmitting and receiving many helically propagating Lamb waves via longitudinal transducers in contact with the surface of a pipe, crosshole tomographic geometries can be mimicked and tomographic reconstructions performed in order to locate and size flaws. We describe here a meridional-array scheme which mimics a single line of transducers along the exterior surface of the pipe in the axial direction, and show proof of concept results on a pipe sample with an internal wall-thinning. We also demonstrate improved reconstructions for the other helical ultrasound tomography geometry where the transmitters and receivers lie along parallel circumferential rings. We find frequency compounding smoothes out some of the noise and artifacts that appear in the reconstructions. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.