Composite magnetic flux leakage detection method for pipelines using alternating magnetic field excitation

Pipelines are an important transportation medium for petroleum and chemical products, but defects in the pipelines can present hidden dangers and affect the safe operation of the pipeline. The traditional pipeline magnetic flux leakage (MFL) scanning technique generally adopts the axial magnetization mode, which has increased the difficulty in detection and the possibility of missed detection of axial cracks. In this paper, a new composite MFL method using alternating magnetic field excitation is proposed for the detection of cracks in pipelines. The alternating magnetic field is first superimposed on the MFL magnetization field, which will form a parallel eddy current field perpendicular to the magnetization direction in the pipeline wall. The defects in the pipeline not only cause the flux leakage of the magnetization field, but also lead to the disturbance of the circumferential eddy current field. The disturbance signals can be picked up through a secondary induced magnetic field. Because the magnetic field and the eddy current field are orthogonal, the presented method can implement synchronous detection in two orthogonal directions to avoid missed detection caused by the crack orientation. A series of physical experiments are carried out in this paper. The results show that two orthogonal detection signals can be separated by a simple low pass filter. Therefore, with only one scan, the new detector can obtain the defect characteristics in the axial and circumferential directions to overcome the blind spot problem seen in traditional MFL detectors.