Circular Phased Array Ultrasonic Transducer Design for Internal Inspection of Natural Gas Pipeline

In the paper, a 256-element circular array ultrasonic transducer is designed to create a controllable and focused 3D cylindrical ultrasound beam for pipeline inspection of natural gas pipelines. First, a localized three-dimensional acoustic modeling of the considered 250-mm-caliber pipeline is constructed by using the k-Wave toolbox. Then, the layout manner of the phased array is given previously, while the active aperture and input signal frequency of the phased array are determined via the experimental method. Finally, the simulation results on the axial-radial and circumferential-radial planes are exhibited to analysis the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results indicate that the piezoelectric transducer array can derive a feasible focused beam, providing a basis for future transducer prototyping.