Guided-Wave-Based Excitation and Detection Technology on Petroleum Storage Tank Periphery

As a non-invasive and economically viable means of assessing structural degradation, the application of ultrasonic guided waves to assess the structural health of petroleum storage tank floors is an emerging technology. However, Due to the attenuation characteristics of the UGW propagation and multiple reflections and transmissions of Lamb waves caused by welds, the effective UGW will be buried in the noise due to too small energy. Therefore, this paper carries out work from three aspects: UGW excitation, signal analysis and system construction. We use spatial multi-point combination excitation to enhance the energy of the source signal, so that the received signal energy is higher to increase the guided wave propagation distance and the detection effectiveness. The results show that when the signal is excited simultaneously to the excitation points of the chime upside and the wall to form a combined excitation, the amplitude of the waveforms obtained by each receiving point is increased by 64% to 100% compared with a single excitation at one point. The excitation method can be used to assess the structural health of the petroleum storage tank floors based on UGW.