Recent Trend in the Use of Guided-Waves for Inspecting Pipeline Defects

Pipelines are crucial infrastructure in civil life and industries. However, in-service pipelines are prone to defects, which may cause leakage resulting in huge economic losses or human causalities in serious cases if the defects are not found at the early stage of development. Ultrasonic guided-waves is a promising new technique for the inspection of various pipelines. The main purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review on the state and process of the art of guided-waves for the inspection of pipeline, focusing on the transduction system and wave management in pipeline. The problems and difficulties involved in these aspects will be systematically identified and analyzed, which will also highlight the areas where attention or further research is required. Motivated by these analysis and discussion, some proposed methods or suggestions to address these problems will be presented. Finally, we will show the perspective of pipeline inspection based on cylindrical guided-waves technique to researchers and application engineers.