Scattering of Guided Waves by Circumferential Cracks in Steel Pipes

Abstract

A novel numerical procedure is presented in this paper to study wave scattering problem by circumferential cracks in steel pipes. The study is motivated by the need to develop a quantitative ultrasonic technique to characterize properties of cracks in pipes. By employing wave function expansion in axial direction and decomposing the problem into a symmetry problem and an antisymmetry problem, a three-dimensional wave scattering problem is then reduced into two quasi-one-dimensional problems. This simplification greatly reduces the computational time. Numerical results for reflection and transmission coefficients of different incident wave modes are presented here for a steel pipe with cracks (may have arbitrary circumferential crack length and radial crack depth) and they are shown to agree quite closely with available but limited experimental data.