Ultrasonic wave based pressure measurement in small diameter pipeline

• It is difficult to measure pressure in small diameter pipeline (less than 10mm). A new ultrasonic non-destructive testing method is proposed to solve this problem.
• There is definite relationship between pipe pressure and ultrasonic velocity in Kneser liquid that we measured. The effect of temperature on ultrasonic velocity is also considered.
• We used the variation of ultrasonic propagation time difference to reflect actual pressure in this paper to reduce the environmental influences.
• The relationship between time difference and pipe pressure is acquired with the use of neural network, the results show that this method is accurate and can be used in practice.

An effective non-intrusive method of ultrasound-based technique that allows monitoring liquid pressure in small diameter pipeline (less than 10 mm) is presented in this paper. Ultrasonic wave could penetrate medium, through the acquisition of representative information from the echoes, properties of medium can be reflected. This pressure measurement is difficult due to that echoes’ information is not easy to obtain in small diameter pipeline. The proposed method is a study on pipeline with Kneser liquid and is based on the principle that the transmission speed of ultrasonic wave in pipeline liquid correlates with liquid pressure and transmission speed of ultrasonic wave in pipeline liquid is reflected through ultrasonic propagation time providing that acoustic distance is fixed. Therefore, variation of ultrasonic propagation time can reflect variation of pressure in pipeline. Ultrasonic propagation time is obtained by electric processing approach and is accurately measured to nanosecond through high resolution time measurement module. We used ultrasonic propagation time difference to reflect actual pressure in this paper to reduce the environmental influences. The corresponding pressure values are finally obtained by acquiring the relationship between variation of ultrasonic propagation time difference and pressure with the use of neural network analysis method, the results show that this method is accurate and can be used in practice.