Decoupling the Influence of Wall Thinning and Cladding Thickness Variations in Pulsed Eddy Current Using Principal Component Analysis

Corrosion may develop and grow on steel pipes under layers of insulation and cladding. Inspection of the pipes through these protective layers is of paramount importance. Pulsed eddy current (PEC) is a primary non-destructive testing (NDT) technique candidate for this type of inspection as it requir...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE sensors journal 2021-10, Vol.21 (19), p.22011-22018
Main Authors: Nafiah, Faris, Tokhi, Mohammad O., Shirkoohi, Gholamhossein, Duan, Fang, Zhao, Zhanfang, Rees-Lloyd, Owen
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cladding
Decoupling
Eddy current testing
Eddy currents
Inspection
Insulation
Material properties
Non-destructive testing
Nondestructive testing
pipe inspection
Principal component analysis
Principal components analysis
Probes
pulsed eddy current
Sensors
Steel
Steel pipes
Thickness measurement
Wall thickness
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Summary:Corrosion may develop and grow on steel pipes under layers of insulation and cladding. Inspection of the pipes through these protective layers is of paramount importance. Pulsed eddy current (PEC) is a primary non-destructive testing (NDT) technique candidate for this type of inspection as it requires no contact with the inspection material. To overcome the variability in PEC signals due to variations in the cladding thickness, a large measurement set is analysed in this paper using principal component analysis (PCA). The PCA approach decomposes the signal set into a number of uncorrelated variables that explain the maximum amount of the variance in the data set, in which, in this respect, efficiently separate the influences contributed by the difference in the material properties of cladding and pipe wall. The feasibility of using PCA to quantify simulated steel pipe wall independent of confounding cladding thickness variations is investigated. It is found that, with sufficient amount of data, the approach can effectively separate the influences contributed by the wall thickness variations from the cladding thickness variations.
ISSN:1530-437X
1558-1748
DOI:10.1109/JSEN.2021.3100648