Analyses of magnetic field in spiral steel pipe

•An analyzing method of the magnetic field in spiral steel pipe is proposed.•Magnetic field in spiral steel pipe was analyzed and verified experimentally.•Magnetic sudden change near pipe end is much bigger than that near spiral weld.•We can identify girth weld using this sudden change to locate in-pipe detector.

In order to confirm the feasibility of identifying the girth welds using the magnetic field in spiral pipelines, the distributions of the magnetic field in spiral steel pipes with different sizes and different magnetizations were analyzed using the equivalent magnetic charge method, and were verified experimentally. The magnetic field inside spiral steel pipes is generally uniform with very small magnetic sudden changes at the spiral welds, whereas the magnetic field near the pipe ends has very big local changes. The size of spiral pipes, including its wall thickness, length, diameter, and the lift-off, has various influences on the local magnetic sudden changes at the spiral welds (LMASW) and the magnetic incremental near the pipe ends (MINPE), whereas the difference between LMASW and MINPE is always quite considerable. The bigger the radial magnetization component is, the bigger the difference between LMASW and MINPE is. When the radial magnetization component is small, changes of the circumferential and axial magnetization components can reduce this difference. Since the magnetizations of each pipe are seldom identical, the magnetic field inside each pipe is usually quite different. Thus there will be a big local magnetic sudden change at the girth weld inside the spiral pipeline, and this sudden change is much stronger than LMASW. Therefore, we can still consider identifying the girth welds using the magnetic field in spiral pipelines to improve the positioning accuracy of the in-pipe detector.