Acoustic Emission Sound Source Localization for crack in the pipeline

Liying Sun1,2, Yibo Li2

1. Dept. of Energy and Mechanics Engineering Tianjin Institute of Urban Construction, Tianjin 300384
E-mail: sunliyingying @gmail.com
2. State Key Lab. of Precision Measurement Technology and Instrument Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, China
E-mail: slyb@tju.edu.cn

Abstract: This paper investigates the use of acoustic emission (AE) for simulated crack in a stainless steel pipeline. An
approach to liner sound source localization in pipeline using two or more acoustic sensors is described, and rules to
define timing parameters - peak definition time (PDT), Hit definition time (HDT) and Hit lockout time (HLT) of acoustic
emission signal is studied in order to improve the sound localization accuracy. Experiments were conducted on a
stainless steel pipeline with no special features, such as branch, weld, and flange on the experimental part. The detail
process of Nielsen-Hsu Pencil Lead Break method which is used to simulate the crack, and main considerations in
acoustic emission transducer selection are also introduced in this paper.
Key Words: Acoustic emission; Pipeline, Sound source location, Simulated crack

computer to define the localization, as well as other features

1 INTRODUCTION
Acoustic emission is the class of phenomena where
transient elastic waves are generated by the rapid release of
energy from localized sources within a material [1].
Acoustic emission testing is one of the main important
non-destructive methods used in pressure testing,
diagnostics, status monitoring and leak detection. The
acoustic emission method may be used to prevent
catastrophic failure of systems with unknown
discontinuities and to limit the maximum pressure during
containment system tests. It offers the following advantages
over other nondestructive testing methods [2]: Firstly,
acoustic emission testing is a dynamic test method in that it
provides a response to discontinuity growth under an
imposed structural stress. It is to note that static
discontinuities will not generate acoustic emission signals.
Secondly, acoustic emission testing can detect and evaluate
the significance of discontinuities throughout an entire
structure during a single test. Thirdly, because only limited
access is required, discontinuities may be detected that are
inaccessible to other methods. Furthermore, vessels and
other pressure systems can often be prequalified during an
in-service test that requires little or no downtime.
Due to these brilliant features, the acoustic emission
method becomes the research focus in many fields,
especially in oil and chemical industries in recent 20 years.
When a crack or etch pit exists on the pipe under pressure,
stress waves carrying significant information of the
acoustic source, such as crack dimension, and position of
the defect may be generated. The stress waves travelling
along the pipe can be collected by acoustic emission
transducers, then being analyzed and processed by
of the defect, such as type, stage and criticality of the
defect.
After the introduction, the paper is organized in the
following sections. Section 2 describes principle of an
approach to liner sound source localization using two or
more acoustic sensors, and rules to define timing
parameters, such as PDT, HDT and HLT, aiming at
improving the sound localization accuracy. Section 3
presents an experiment conducted on the stainless steel pipe
with 100 mm diameter to study the effect of timing
parameter on localization accuracy. Section 4 presents
conclusions and planned further work.
2 LINEAR LOCALIZATION METHOD AND
CONFIGURATION RULES OF TIMING
PARAMETER
2.1 Sound Localization
Two transducers are mounted on a pipe shown in Fig. 1.
Assume that an acoustic emission event occurs somewhere
on the pipe and that the resulting stress waves propagate in
both directions at the same constant velocity. Referring to
Fig. 1, if the first hit occurs at transducer 1 and second hit
occurs at transducer 2, the coarsest form of source location
would lies in the area between transducer 1 and transducer
2, and nearer to transducer 1.

The research is supported by National Science Foundation for Young

Scientists of China (Grant No. 50804034), Tianjin Natural Science
Foundation (09JCYBJC02200), Open Foundation Project supported by
State key laboratory of precision measuring technology and instruments Fig. 1 Schematic of liner sound localization of pipeline
(Pil0907) and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (20090450768).

c
978-1-4244-5182-1/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE 4298
In reality, when the source is uncertain, we can use 3 or mainly concerned before other localization algorithm were
more evenly spaced transducers to define the location area used to estimate the time difference in order to achieve
of the source. This is known as zone localization. This area higher localization accuracy.
can be defined somewhat by also noting the first and second
hit transducer. For example, if the first hit is at transducer 3 2.2 Configuration of timing parameters
and the second hit is at transducer 2, then the source lies
The time difference measured by modern Acoustic
between transducer 2 and 3, see fig. 2. After defined the
Emission instrument is based on the time that signal arrives
defect area, liner sound localization method can be applied
to locate the defect. at each channel. And the signal arriving time recorded by
AE instrument is related to configuration of trigger level
and frequency of time piece. The sampling time of
advanced instrument can reach 250 ns, therefore, the
influence of timing parameter configuration is more
distinct.
When stress wave is propagating in solid, reflection,
refraction, or mode change, as well as attenuation and
Fig. 2 Schematic of zone localization overlap of the waveform, may occur when it arrives at
different interfaces. If transducers received stress wave
The simple input information allows only the identification with different mode of the same sound source, the time
of an encompassing zone rather than pinpointing the source difference estimated may deviated, and large error of
site. However, if not only the hit sequence but the time localization may accompany.
difference between hits is measured, more precise source In order to lower down the error, timing parameters, such as
location can be performed [3]. If the time difference Peak definition time (PDT), Hit definition time (HDT) and
between hits at transducer 1 and transducer 2 was zero, it Hit lockout time (HLT) should be defined accurately, as it
would indicate a site precisely midway between the two is shown in Fig. 3 (a)-(c).
transducers. Or consider this situation, when the hit PDT is the time configured by AE instrument to define the
sequence is transducer 2 followed by transducer 1, the time peak of the collected waveform. If it is set too short, the real
difference between hits is equal to the time taken to cross peak of the waveform may not be detected.
the entire pair separation: HDT is the time to define the hit duration time in order that
all counts in one hit are calculated.
Δt = D / v (1) HLT represents Hit lockout time which is used to decrease
where D is the distance (meter) between transducers, v is the negative effect of reflection in reverberant environment.
the constant wave velocity (meter per second) and Δt is
the difference (second) of arrival time, and it is given by
. Δt = T1 − T2 (2)
where T1 and T2 are the time that the source signal arrives at
the transducers.
The source would then be located at transducer 2. In
general, the source location d is given by:
1
d = ( D − Δt ⋅ v) (3
2
)
where d is measured from the first hit transducer.
The linear case is most appropriate when the transducer
separation is large compared to the diameter of the test (a)
object. As this ratio reduces, sources close to the
transducers can become mislocated if they are away from
the direct axial line through the participating transducers.
The significant part of this method is to define wave
velocity v and estimate time difference Δt . Actually, v
along the pipe can be defined by using the recommended
value of the engineering manual, or by measurement with
some compensation algorithm, as in reference [4]. And Δt
can be obtained by the arriving time collected by
multichannel AE instrument. Then basic cross-correlation
(BCC), generalized cross-correlation method (GCC), or
other spectrum analysis method [5] can be used to estimate (b)
the time difference. In the following section, timing
parameters, such as the peak definition time (PDT), Hit
definition time (HDT) and Hit lockout time (HLT) is

2010 Chinese Control and Decision Conference 4299


(c)
Fig. 3 Configuration of AE timing parameter(a) PDT; (b) HDT;
(c)HLT
3 AE EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION
3.1 Acoustic Emission Transducers
When an acoustic emission wave front impinges on the
surface of a test object, very minute movements of the
surface molecules occur. A transducer’s function is to
detect this mechanical movement and convert it into a
specific, usable electric signal. The main considerations in
transducer selection are (1) operating frequency, (2)
sensitivity and (3) environmental and physical
characteristics.
The transducers for acoustic emission testing generally use
a piezoelectric sensor as the electromechanical conversion
device. The element is usually a special ceramic such as
lead zirconate titanate and is acoustically coupled to the
surface of the pipe so that the dynamic surface motion
propagates into the piezoelectric element. The dynamic
strain in the element produces a voltage-versus-time signal
as the transducer output. The transducers may be resonant
or broad band. R3 with resonant frequency of 30 KHz is
used in this experiment.
Fig. 4 Nielsen-Hsu Pencil Lead Break test
3.2 Simulation of crack signal in the pipe
The generation of crack in the pipe is an instant process,
thus it is difficult to acquire real crack signal in a lab. It is a
usual practice to simulate crack in the pipe using
Nielsen-Hsu Pencil Lead Break method [6], see fig. 4.
Nielsen-Hsu Pencil, which is named after developer of the
technique, is an aid to simulate an acoustic emission event
using the fracture of a brittle graphite lead in a suitable
fitting. During the test, a 0.5 mm (alternatively 0.3mm)
diameter 2H pencil lead is broken approximately 3 mm (+/-
0.5 mm) from its tip by pressing it against the surface of the
4300 2010 Chinese Control and Decision Conference
piece. This generates an intense acoustic signal, quite
similar to a natural AE source. It is stated in reference [7]
that acoustic signal generated in the rupture process in solid
material has the same waveform with simulated signal
generated by pencil break test.
3.3 Experiment procedure
In this work, experiments were conducted on an
experimental stainless steel pipe in the Laboratory. The
pipe is approximately 20 m in length, with outer diameter
and wall thickness of the pipe being 100mm and 2.4 mm,
respectively. However, a section of smooth area were
selected as experimental part since we need to avoid
reflection and refraction disturbance from pipe features
such as weld, valve, branch or flange.
The experimental instrument consisted of multi-channel
acoustic emission instrument with PCI-2 signal acquisition
and processing board, AE transducers R3 with resonant
frequency of 30 kHz, and other attachment, such as
holdings and couplant, which were needed in the
experiment. PCI-2 is a real time AE feature extraction
board with 40 MHz sampling rate and 18-bit A/D
conversion resolution. The transducers are strapped around
the pipe, acquiring acoustic wave propagating along the
pipe wall. Figure 5 shows the experimental pipe. Distance
between two transducers is 1.8 meters.
Fig.5 Schematic diagram of experimental pipe
Acoustic emission signals are acquired based on a specific
threshold and other processing parameters (such as PDT,
HDT and HLT). Once AE signals are collected, they
cannot be changed. If collected under a poor setup, the
data are useless and cannot be regenerated. However, if all
the original waveforms are stored, they can be reprocessed
to generate new acoustic emission features at different
thresholds, different filtering and setup parameters.
Therefore, the simulated crack signals are collected with
high sampling rate (2M) and low threshold (35dB).
Acoustic emission test equipment settings were as follows:
40 dB preamplifier gain with a 100 to 300 kHz bandpass
filter, 35 dB threshold, 20 dB system gain, 1000 μs peak
definition time, 2000 μs hit definition time and 2000 μs hit
lockout time, detail information is shown in Table 1.
Acoustic emission parameters were acquired and
waveform is storage to analyze and improve the results.
Time difference was estimated to locate the sound source.
The position to conduct pencil lead break test is between
sensor 1 and sensor 2 and 1.0 meter from sensor 1. The
test was conducted 3 times, and at least 1 min interval was
put apart between each two tests. Localization result and
calculated errors are shown in Table 2.
Table 1. Acoustic Emission System Initialization Settings
Parameter configuration
 Acoustic emission peak definition time 1000 ȝs work. In general, measurements of hits, counts and energy
Acoustic emission hit definition time 2000 ȝs provide an indication of source intensity or severity. This
Acoustic emission hit lockout time 2000 ȝs information is useful for determining whether the test
Acoustic emission transducer gain 40 dB
Acoustic emission threshold 30 dB
object is accumulating damage and, in turn, for deciding
Location wave speed 5.7 km/s whether the test should continue or if the structure in
question should remain in service. In many cases, the high
sensitivity of acoustic emission testing also detects
Table 2. Sound Source Localization Result unwanted background noises that cannot be removed by
Localization and error Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 signal processing. For acoustic emission to be used
Sound localization result(mm) 965 968 966 effectively in these applications, it is necessary to identify
Relative error 3.5% 3.2% 3.4% the source feature of each signal as it is received. The
further work will be conducted in order to define the
It can be seen that the calculated sound localization result criticality of the source according to its waveform as well as
are all lower than its real position. After analyzing the acoustic emission parameters by methods or algorithm, for
collected waveform of sensor 1 and sensor 2, timing example, spectral analysis and pattern recognition method.
parameters and threshold of the acquired signal were
reconfigured (see TABLE3). The recalculated sound ACKNOWLEDGMENT
localization result and error are shown in table 4.
The author would like to thank National Science
Table 3. Acoustic Emission System Settings Foundation for Young Scientists of China (Grant No.
Parameter configuration
50804034), Tianjin Natural Science Foundation
Acoustic emission peak definition time 40 ȝs (09JCYBJC02200), Open Foundation Project supported by
Acoustic emission hit definition time 150 ȝs State key laboratory of precision measuring technology and
Acoustic emission hit lockout time 300 ȝs instruments (Pil0907) and China Postdoctoral Science
Acoustic emission transducer gain 40 dB Foundation (20090450768).
Acoustic emission threshold 45dB
Location wave speed 5.7 km/s REFERENCES
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