Ultrasonic inspection of underwater guy wires with applications to floating oil platforms

This paper presents initial work on the development of an Ultrasonic Testing (UT) system to inspect defects in the inner and outer surfaces of underwater guy wires. The methodology involves placing ultrasonic transducers adjacent to simulated sections of guy wire and the analysis of the resultant echo profiles. The goal of this work is to determine if it is feasible to use ultrasonic testing to develop a machine learning based detection system. From the experimental results, we determined that the amplitude and time of arrival (TOA) of the first received wave signals gives a very significant clue to distinguishing the existence of a defect and its severity. Between the amplitude and time of arrival (TOA), the time of arrival (TOA) give a more promising indication since it was affected by the experimental factors in a consistent manner. Therefore, based on these results, we are encouraged to continue to develop ultrasonic techniques to assess underwater guy wires. In this lab scale study, ultrasound transceivers were placed around a physical model of a guy wire and used to develop and record acoustic signals. A Matlab
^TM
based program was developed to do signal processing to extract the position of echo sources from the signal record. Guy wire condition is an important factor in the stability and safety of floating oil and gas platforms. Our final goal in this work is to develop an automatic system to inspect oil and gas floating platform guy wires to improve safety and avoid ecological and financial disasters such as has been witnessed in recent days.