Experimental study to differentiate between top and bottom defects for MFL tank floor inspections

Defects due to corrosion can occur on top and bottom surfaces of a tank floor. The current magnetic flux leakage (MFL) tank inspection machines can detect and locate defects on both the top and bottom of a plate, but generally they are unable to differentiate between top and bottom. Further cleaning for visual inspections is needed to identify those defect that are on the top side and are thus more readily repaired. To avoid this additional inspection ideally the machine should be able to distinguish automatically between top and bottom surface corrosion. This paper presents experimental work specifically designed to asses the capability of current MFL based machines to distinguish defects located on the top and those on the bottom of the tank floor. Although some open literature suggests that such top or bottom classification might be possible, purpose designed experimental results presented here show that there is a very high similarity between signals belonging to top and bottom defects which suggests such discrimination is not viable using standard MFL based techniques.