WAVEGUIDE ULTRASONIC SENSOR FOR CONTINUOUS MONITORING OF CORROSION AT HIGH TEMPERATURES

The development of reliable technical solution for continuous ultrasonic monitoring of the thickness of technological pipelines and vessels operating at temperatures up to 600 °C is an actual problem, the solution of which is of great practical importance for the import substitution of automated corrosion monitoring systems at Russian enterprises of oil and gas and chemical industries. This paper describes the main stages of creating a domestic analogue of a high-temperature waveguide sensor for ultrasonic thickness measurement. To determine the thickness of objects at different temperatures, a temperature compensation algorithm has been developed and programmatically implemented that takes into account the temperature dependence of the propagation velocity of ultrasonic wave, the thickness of waveguides, the distance between the waveguides at the point of contact with the surface of the object, and the thermal expansion of the waveguide material and the object. The results of laboratory and field tests of an experimental waveguide sensor equipped with a contact-type temperature sensor, the readings of which are processed simultaneously with the received ultrasonic signals, are presented.