Structural damage detection in pipeline using lamb waves and wavelet transform

Over the last few decades, damage identification methods of civil and mechanical structures have been drawing much interest from various fields. This article presented a novel time-frequency based approach for detecting structural damage in pipeline. This is done by applying lamb wave technique and wavelet transforms for detection of change in the structural response data. Lamb waves were propagated through pipes and the received signals were subjected to wavelet transforms. The viability of the proposed approach is demonstrated using simulation examples. The pipes were modeled using finite -element method. This damage detection technique may serve the purpose of structural health monitoring because of long -distance inspection capability in situations where spatially distributed measurement of structural response is difficult. © 2011 Copyright Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).