Ultrasonic Time-of-Flight Diffraction Imaging Enhancement for Pipeline Girth Weld Testing via Time-Domain Sparse Deconvolution and Frequency-Domain Synthetic Aperture Focusing

Ultrasonic TOFD imaging, as an important non-destructive testing method, has a wide range of applications in pipeline girth weld inspection and testing. Due to the limited bandwidth of ultrasonic transducers, near-surface defects in the weld are masked and cannot be recognized, resulting in poor longitudinal resolution. Affected by the inherent diffraction effect of scattered acoustic waves, defect images have noticeable trailing, resulting in poor transverse resolution of TOFD imaging and making quantitative defect detection difficult. In this paper, based on the assumption of the sparseness of ultrasonic defect distribution, by constructing a convolutional model of the ultrasonic TOFD signal, the Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) sparse deconvolution algorithm is utilized to enhance the longitudinal resolution. Based on the synthetic aperture acoustic imaging model, in the wavenumber domain, backpropagation inference is implemented through phase transfer technology to eliminate the influence of diffraction effects and enhance transverse resolution. On this basis, the time-domain sparse deconvolution and frequency-domain synthetic aperture focusing methods mentioned above are combined to enhance the resolution of ultrasonic TOFD imaging. The simulation and experimental results indicate that this technique can outline the shape of defects with fine detail and improve image resolution by about 35%.