Efficient residual reliability criterion index in a permanent guided wave monitoring system

Abstract

The permanent guided ultrasonic wave monitoring system has been increasingly applied in pipeline condition monitoring, as it provides reliable and accurate pipeline damage information. However, environmental and operational conditions (EOCs) arise due to variations in external factors such as temperature variations, humidity, air pressure and random noise. Such conditions may jeopardise the quality of damage detection results. Small damage such as cracks often underlies within the EOC effect and goes undetected. In this paper, a new damage features extraction method based on the residual reliability criterion (RRC) is proposed, and the superiority of the RRC in small damage identification is demonstrated. Four damage detection schemes are compared using the established receiver operating characteristics (ROC) performance evaluation method. The GUW database is obtained from numerical modelling and an experiment verification model. The results show that the RRC method performs significantly better than the other three damage detection schemes under EOC effects.