Equivalent MFL model of pipelines for 3-D defect reconstruction using simulated annealing inversion procedure

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an equivalent forward model of magnetic flux leakage (MFL) inspection in pipelines to reduce the computation effort to predict MFL signals. Then an iterative simulated annealing inversion procedure is developed to reconstruct the three-dimensional (3-D) defect profile from MFL signals. Experiments results, based on both simulated and measured MFL signals, demonstrate that the proposed inversion procedure using the equivalent forward model has high performance in terms of execution speed and accuracy.