IBP1030_19

Numerical and Experimental Analysis for

Inspection of Composite Wrapped Pipelines
Using Shearography and FEM
TIAGO J. BOROLI1, ESTIVEN S. BARRERA2,
ANALUCIA V. FANTIN3, MAURO E. BENEDET4,
ARMANDO A. GONÇALVES5, DANIEL P.
WILLEMANN6
Copyright 2019, Brazilian Petroleum, Gas and Biofuels Institute - IBP
This Technical Paper was prepared for presentation at the Rio Pipeline Conference and Exhibition 2019, held
between 03 and 05 of September, in Rio de Janeiro. This Technical Paper was selected for presentation by the
Technical Committee of the event according to the information contained in the final paper submitted by the
author(s). The organizers are not supposed to translate or correct the submitted papers. The material as it is
presented, does not necessarily represent Brazilian Petroleum, Gas and Biofuels Institute’ opinion, or that of its
Members or Representatives. Authors consent to the publication of this Technical Paper in the Rio Pipeline
Conference and Exhibition 2019.

Abstract

In order to increase the safety and reliability of industrial facilities, the composite material has
been increasingly used in the oil and gas industry, as an inhibitor of external corrosion in parts
of metal pipes. These procedures increase the life of the pipe, saving significant time and
resources. However, the corrosion may continue over time. In extreme cases, it can cause holes
under the coating that cannot be detected by simple visual inspection. For these cases, advanced
non-destructive inspection techniques are needed. Shearography is a non-destructive technique
capable of detecting defects under the coating. However, the defect sizing is still an unexplored
field. The goal of this work is to quantify the dimensions of through-holes detected by
shearography under the composite material coating. For this, numerical and experimental
comparison were done using shearography measurements and simulations by FEM (Finite
Element Method). The minimum of the square error results in an estimation of the through-
hole. Experiments were performed with 150 mm diameter tubes holes hidden by composite
material layers. Smaller thicknesses and bigger diameters led to better results. Mean deviations
of the order of 10% were found for a set of experiments. Although the authors consider that it
is feasible to further improve these results, deviations of about 10% are already very acceptable
results and represent a significant improvement over the classic methods used today.

Keywords: Shearography. Non-destructive test. Defect quantification. Oil and gas industry

1. Introduction

Composite materials are a very good options for reconstruction and repair of pipes,
tanks and pressure vessels used in the oil and gas industry due to their high stiffness and
resistance to corrosion (GIBSON, 2012). Composite materials prevent the corrosion action on
the external wall when applied to pipes as a protective coating. However, the coating does not
inhibit the corrosion progress inside the tube installed in the areas exposed to harsh substances.
In advanced stages, corrosion can reduce the pipeline thickness and, in extreme cases, can occur
______________________________
1 Master, Mechanical Engineer – FEDERAL UNIVERSITY OF SANTA CATARINA
Doctor, Mechanical Engineer – FEDERAL UNIVERSITY OF SANTA CATARINA
2, 3, 4, 5
6 Doctor, Mechanical Engineer – STATE UNIVERSITY OF SANTA CATARINA
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holes in the pipeline wall, as can be seen in the scheme shown in Figure 1. The application of
the coatings in these parts avoids leaks, increases the useful life and retard the replacement of
the damaged section, saving significant time and resources (GROYSMAN, 2017).

Figure 1. Composite material applied in a corroded pipeline.

However, over time the corrosion continues acting and progressively increasing the
dimension of the hole under the composite material. It requires the monitoring of the failure in
order to maintain the integrity of the pipe, complying with standards that determine maximum
dimensions for these holes. For these cases, non-destructive inspection techniques are
recommended (YANG, 2016).
Shearography is a non-destructive interferometric technique able of measuring small
deformations on surfaces (YOSHIZAWA, 2009; FANTIN, 2013). The deformations can
reveals the defects under or between layers of the protective coating (FANTIN, 2013).
However, the sizing of these defects detected with shearography (ANGELIS, et.al., 2011) is
still an unexplored field and is the focus of this work.
This paper shows the numerical and experimental analysis for the measurement of
hole dimensions present in metallic pipes coated with composite materials. For the experiments,
four 150 mm diameter metallic pipes were inspected. Each pipe had through-holes in their walls
with diameters ranging from 20 to 50 mm diameter. All the through-holes were covered by
glass fiber-reinforced plastic repairs with thickness varying from 6 to 24 mm. For the analysis,
a set of shearography measurements were compared to finite element simulations. This study
discusses an iterative process to determine the diameter of hidden through-holes by the
combination of the experimental and numerical model results.

2. Shearography

A typical shearography setup requires some basic elements, as shown in Figure 2: an

illumination module, an interferometer and a specialized software to drive the measurement
procedure (BARRERA, 2018).

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Figure 2. Typical shearography setup.

An expanded laser beam illuminates the specimen under investigation, which generates
speckle patterns on the surface and it is captured by the camera. A measurement by
shearography reveals displacement gradient fields on the surface in response to a difference of
two loading states (FANTIN, 2016).
Image acquisition and processing usually involves one of two techniques: temporal
phase-measurement (TPM) or spatial phase-measurement (SPM). The TPM requires a sequence
of, at least, three interferometric images with known relative phase shifts (HUNG, 1982) and,
in the other hand, SPM is a technique that need a single image for each loading state. The SPM
techniques are very effective to reduce disturbances coming from environmental factors
(BARRERA, 2018). For this reason, SPM method was used to shearography measurements.
References (YANG, 2016; YOSHIZAWA, 2009) contain more information about
shearography setup as well as measurement principle.

2.1. Inspected pipes

Metallic pipes, especially those that suffer from internal corrosion and were coated with
composite material, are the specimens studied in this work. The Figure 3 shows one of through
hole and a metallic pipe coated with different thickness of composite material.

Figure 3. Metallic pipe with through hole and pipe coated.

Figure 4 shows the experimental setup used for the tests: (1) shearography head sensor,
(2) water pump for internal pressure variation in the specimen, (3) computer,
(4) specimen.

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Figure 4. Experimental setup. (1) Shearography head sensor. (2) Water pump. (3) Computer. (4) Specimen.

The tests performed by shearography followed a well elaborated procedure in order to

obtain a good quality of the fringes facilitating the post processing. Two important points to
consider are the use of the image and the number of fringes. The number of fringes is usually
limited in four fringe orders and the region of the defect in the image the higher the better.

3. Experimental Numerical Comparison Method

To simulate the real experiment, metallic pipes containing through holes were designed
with different diameters and coated with different thickness of composite material. The
through-holes are simulated in a commercial software of FEA, respecting all of the boundary
conditions take in the shearography inspection. The internal pressure, material properties and
shear amount are the most important conditions considered for the analysis. In order to generate
well controlled experiments, loading by pressure variation was used in all shearography
inspections, since it is a very time stable loading type producing well contrasted images.
According to the construction of the specimen with holes, as shown in the Figure 5, FEA
simulates the internal pressure acting directly on the composite material. Therefore,
displacements in these regions are greater than those where the material is perfectly adhered to
the pipe. The Figure 5 (b) illustrates this effect. The color map is related to the out-of-plane
displacement component.

Figure 5. Composite material simulation by FEA with internal pressure variation.

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The comparison is done between the shearographic unwrapped phase map and the
superficial out-of-plane displacements (wN) calculated by FEA. To compare the cap-shaped
surface obtained by FEA with the shearography result (experimental measurement), some
transformations are applied to the numerical surface. The first step is to impose a certain amount
of lateral shear (dx, dy or dxy) to the simulated displacements and subtract them from the not-
sheared displacement result, as shown in the equation (1). After the subtraction, it is necessary
to convert the surface (SN) to the same unit of the experimental result (radians).
𝑆𝑁 (𝑥, 𝑦) = 𝑤𝑁 (𝑥, 𝑦) − 𝑤𝑁 (𝑥 + 𝑑𝑥, 𝑦) (1)

The process of applying the lateral shear and subtracting images produces a third image
showing the difference of the displacement fields. This image is equivalent to the result
obtained by shearography. Figure 6 shows the flow chart of the comparison between finite
element and shearography that is performed to find the holes dimensions.

Figure 6. Flow chart of the experimental-numerical comparison.

The difference between the surfaces is calculated based on the root-mean-square-error

(RMSE), show in equation (2). RMSE is a way of evaluating how much a variable differs from
a value taken as a reference (SHCHERBAKOV, et. al.,2013; WANG, 2018). In this case, the
reference value is the value measured with shearography and the value to be compared comes
from the analysis of finite element.

1
𝑅𝑀𝑆𝐸 = √𝑁𝑒𝑙𝑒𝑚 ∑(𝑆𝑁 − 𝑆𝐸 )2 (2)

where SN are the numerical displacement differences, SE are the experimental

displacement differences and Nelem is the number of points compared. To variate the size of the
hole in the simulation an iterative process presented in the next section was used.

4. Results

The proposed algorithm computes the mean squared errors between numerical and
experimental results obtained from the finite element simulation and the shearography
measurement.
Figure 7 a) shows a shearography measurement of a defect with 30 mm diameter and a
coating 6 mm thickness. To show this defect, an internal pressure variation of 3 bar was used.

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All measurements were taken during depressurizing of the pipes. Figure 7 b) shows the 2D
distribution of the measurement (phase unwrapping).

Figure 7. Shearography result. (a) Phase difference map. (b) 2D representation of the unwrapped phase map.

After the phase unwrapping procedure, the algorithm searches for the best fit using an
iterative process. The radius of the hole, designed in the finite elements mesh (Figure 8), is
incremented by δr and a RMSE value is computed for every iteration.

Figure 8. Variation of the hole size in the finite element mesh of the composite material.

Figure 9 shows the error curve for all increments, which is similar to a parabola. The
minimum value of the error curve corresponds to the best numerical adjustment.

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Figure 9. Error variation according to the changes in the simulated radius.

Figure 10 shows the numerical fringes found by the algorithm and the surface that
correspond to the best fit reached by the algorithm. In this case, the hole diameter is 50 mm and
the diameter found by the algorithm was 49,6 mm, which differs by 0,4 mm from the real
dimension. Figure 11 shows the profile of the line located in the middle of the graph shown in
Figure 10.

Figure 10. Simulated shearography result with the best fit.

Figure 11. Line profile of the surfaces through x direction.

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Normally larger hole sizes have better results. In these cases, due to its lower stiffness,
less pressure is required to produce strain in the through-holes region leading to better
controlled and contrasted fringes (higher quality fringes). On the other hand, smaller defects
presents greater deviations. This is because a minor defect requires higher level of pressure to
be detected, and consequently leads to a high-density of background fringes, making the fringe
pattern more difficult to be accurately processed. For a set of holes analyzed by the proposed
method a mean deviation of 10% was found, showing that the method already presents
applicable results.

5. Conclusions

This work brings a contribution for non-destructive evaluation of through-hole

diameters in pipelines developed under a composite material. A hybrid solution, which
combines numerical and experimental data, was developed and evaluated. The hybrid approach
combines gradient displacement data obtained by shearography system and equivalent data
simulated from a parametric finite element model. An iterative approach minimizes the root-
mean-square-error and, indirectly, determines the through-hole diameter. The proposed
solution is practical and easy to be applied.
The calculation of the hole diameter is strongly dependent of the fringes quality;
therefore, defects represented by fringes of low quality have higher deviations. Conversely,
smaller composite material thicknesses and bigger hole diameters led to better results. The
defect searching procedure can be optimized using differential evolution (DE) algorithms (QIN,
2009) to make the numerical-experimental convergence faster.
The experimental-numerical research will be continued in order to analyze defects of
different geometries and defects located between composite material layers.

7. Acknowledgements

The authors would like to deeply thanks PETROBRAS for encouragement and financial
support through Project SHIC 2.

8. References

ANGELIS, G.; MEO, M.; ALMOND, D.P.; PICKERING, S.G.; ANGIONI, S.L. A new technique to detect
defect size and depth in composite structures using digital shearography and unconstrained optimization.
2011. doi:10.1016.

BARRERA, E. Multiple-aperture one-shot shearography for simultaneous measurements in three

shearing directions. Optics and Lasers in Engineering, 2018.

BORTOLI, T. Método híbrido usando shearografia para determinar raios de furos passantes em tubos
metálicos sob reparos de materiais compósitos. Dissertation. Brazil. Federal University of Santa Catarina.
February 2019.

FANTIN, A. V.; WILLEMANN, D. P., VIOTTI, M.; ALBERTAZZI, A. A computational tool to highlight
anomalies on shearographic images in optical flaw detection. 2013 SPIE. · doi: 10.1117/12.2020978

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FANTIN, A. V.; WILLEMANN, D. P.; BENEDET, M. E; ALBERTAZZI, A . Robust method to improve

the quality of shearographic phase maps obtained in harsh environments. OSA,2016.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1364/AO.55.001318.

GIBSON, R. F. Principles of composite material mechanics. New York: CRC Press, 3. ed., 2012.

GROYSMAN A. Corrosion problems and solutions in oil, gas, refining and petrochemical industry.
Technion (Israeli Institute of Technology), Haifa, Israel. 2017. DOI: 10.1515/kom-2017-0013.

HUNG, Y. Y. Shearography: a new optical method for straing measurement and nondestructive testing. Opt
Eng 1982;21(3):391–5

QIN, A. K.; HUANG, V. L.; SUGANTHAN, P. N. Differential Evolution Algorithm With Strategy
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SHCHERBAKOV, M.V; ET. AL. A Survey of Forecast Error Measures. Volgograd State Technical
University. 2013. doi: 10.5829/idosi.wasj.2013.24.itmies.80032.

WANG, W.; LU, Y. Analysis of the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and the Root Mean Square Error
(RMSE) in Assessing Rounding Model. CFETS Information Technology. 2018. IOP Publishing: China.
doi:10.1088/1757-899X/324/1/012049.

YANG, L.; XIE, X. Digital Shearography: New developments and Applications. SPIE: Washington, 2016.

YOSHIZAWA, T. Handbook of optical metrology: principles and applications. CRC Press Taylor & Francis
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