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US 8,408,065 B2Granted
Dry-coupled permanently installed ultrasonic sensor linear array
AssigneeBP Corporation North America Inc.
InventorsJohn Nyholt, Gary N. Langlois
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Abstract
This invention relates to permanent, ultrasonic, flexible, dry-coupled, linear arrays for the inspection of pipelines, process equipment, and the like. The permanent, ultrasonic, flexible, dry-coupled, linear arrays detect and/or measure corrosion wall loss, stress corrosion cracking, and/or internal initiated pipeline cracking. The apparatus for ultrasonically testing materials includes a linear array of ultrasonic sensors, and a flexible, acoustically transmissive, dry-coupling surrounding at least a portion of each of the ultrasonic sensors.
Claims11
A method of testing materials, the method comprising:
- conforming a dry-coupling to a test material;
- securing the dry-coupling to the test material;
- disposing a flexible linear array of ultrasonic sensors with respect to the dy-coupling;
- and
- measuring or detecting at least one property of the test material with the linear array through the acoustically transmissive dry-coupling, wherein the measuring comprises transmitting a signal to the linear array from a second generally parallel linear array.
2 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.