Monitoring of inside surface crack growth by strain measurement of the outside surface: A feasibility study

Cracks detected by in-service inspections are not always removed when they are judged to be not hazardous according to fitness-for-service evaluations. In order to secure the integrity of the cracked components, it is important to confirm that the cracks do not grow notably beyond the growth prediction conducted for the judgement. However, due to the limitation of accuracy of size determination by the current inspection techniques such as ultrasonic testing, it is difficult to know how much the cracks have grown since their previous measurement. In this study, feasibility of a crack growth monitoring method (outside strain monitoring method) was evaluated by finite element analyses and experiments. When a pipe deforms elastically due to internal pressure, the strain at its outside surface increases. The magnitude of strain near the crack differs from that at an uncracked portion, and the difference depends on the crack size. Elastic finite element analyses were performed for cracked pipes under internal pressure for various crack sizes. It was shown that, by measuring the change in strain at the outside surface of the cracked pipe, the crack size and how much the crack grew can be identified. In the experiment, cracked pipes were subjected to static internal pressure and strains for eight cracks of different sizes were measured. It was revealed that the maximum error was 0.44 mm for the estimation of crack depth of 4 mm and 0.28 mm for the estimation of 1 mm crack growth in the depth direction.