DefinePK

Abstract

Emerging faults are typically associated with excessive heat or heat loss. Capturing these heat images and analyzing them allows a quick solution to be taken. Due to that, thermography infrared is widely used nowadays as a non-destructive testing for a fast detecting variety of defects. In this paper, application of active thermography method for detection of internal pipe defects has been investigated. The main focus of the project is on the identification of two most common defects of pipeline; (i) welding defects, and (ii) erosion defects. Three types of welding defects; crack, undercut and lack of fusion weld and also internal erosion defects with different depth were implemented on an ASTM A53 Gr. B carbon steel pipeline as a prediction model for the experiment. During testing these defects were heated through thermal energy generated by heated water. The result found that with the presence of abnormal feature in these defects, propagation of thermal energy through these defects has directly influenced on the surface temperature of the specimen by inducing a significant thermal contrast between defective and non-defective area. Significant temperature gradient occurred within 35 seconds for 100°C, 90°C and 80°C heated water. The others of 70°C and 60°C were found unstable in producing significant infrared image. The 4mm erosion with 66.67% of penetration depth has always shows the higher temperature. The study concludes that active thermography technique is suitable as a non-destructive method for the detection of internal pipeline defects.