Guided wave diffraction tomography within the born approximation.

Detection and sizing of corrosion in pipelines and pressure vessels over large, partially accessible areas is of growing interest in the petrochemical industry. Low-frequency guided wave diffraction tomography is a potentially attractive technique to rapidly evaluate the thickness of large sections of partially accessible structures. Finite element simulations of a 64-element circular array on a plate show that when the scattering mechanism of the object to be reconstructed satisfies the Born approximation, the reconstruction of the thickness is accurate. However, the practical implementation is more challenging because the incident field is not known. This paper describes the baseline subtraction approach commonly used in structural health monitoring applications and proposes a new approach in which the measurement of the incident field is not required when using a circular array of transducers. Experimental results demonstrate that ultimately the scattering from the array of transducers is a major source of error in the tomographic reconstruction, but when there is no scattering from the array of transducers the reconstructions are very similar to the finite element simulations.