Influence of specimen roughness on dry coupling in piezoelectric ultrasonics

Because oil and gas pipelines reside in high-temperature, high-pressure and highly acidic environments for a long time, it is very common for such pipes to experience corrosion thinning. To solve the long-term online monitoring problem of piezoelectric ultrasonic dry coupling of monitored objects with different surface roughnesses, the effects of different thicknesses of silver plates, different surface roughnesses and different coaxial loads on piezoelectric ultrasonic dry coupling were studied here. To improve the low SNR of the acquired signal, a Batworth high-pass filter and zero-phase digital filter are proposed for online ultrasonic monitoring. The effects of three kinds of roughness and axial load on the piezoelectric ultrasonic dry coupling signal are studied, and the relationship between the roughness, thickness of the silver plate and axial load is obtained. The results show that under different roughness conditions, the SNR of the ultrasonic signal increases with increasing axial load. When the axial load reaches a certain magnitude, the SNR of the ultrasonic signal tends to be stable. When the surface roughness is Ra = 1.6 µm and the thickness of the silver plate is 0.05 mm, the SNR of the ultrasonic signal reaches the best value, and the required axial load is minimal.