Long Range Ultrasonic guided waves (LRUT) potentially provide an attractive solution to the

problem of corrosion and metal loss in pipes. They can be excited at one location on the
structure and propagate through long lengths covering 100% of the pipe wall. However,
guided wave testing is complicated by the presence of many possible wave modes, most of
which are dispersive. In this paper, a new EMAT system for pipeline long-range inspection
using non-dispersive Shear Horizontal waves is presented.

Pipelines inspection for corrosion detection with EMATs is demonstrated to be a quick,

efficient and cost-effective methodology. However, the lack of quantitative results means that
any defects identified need to be prove-up by any other complementary technique. In order
to provide a solution to this need, Innerspec proposes a novel defect sizing tool that gives
and indication of the severity of the corrosion in the inspected pipeline. This will help
Operation & Maintenance (O&M) teams to schedule early in advance when a pipe has to be
replaced, reducing asset’s downtime and the cost of those works. Remaining wall loss
estimation is based on the application of Smart Sound Processing (SSP) advanced
techniques. These methods involve extracting useful information from the signals sensed
with the new EMAT LRUT system to obtain nonlinear estimations of the depth of the defect,
and to select the features that better estimate the profile of the pipeline. The proposed
technique has been tested using both simulated and real signals in steel pipelines, obtaining
good results in terms of Root Mean Square Error (RMSE).