Improvement of a vibration-based damage detection approach for health monitoring of bolted flange joints in pipelines

Early detection of bolt loosening is a major concern in the oil and gas industry. In this study, a vibration-based health monitoring strategy has been developed for detecting the loosening of bolts in a pipeline's bolted flange joint. Both numerical and experimental studies are conducted to verify the integrity of our implementation as well as of an enhancement developed along with it. Several damage scenarios are simulated by the loosening of the bolts through varying the applied torque on each bolt. An electric impact hammer is used to vibrate (excite) the system in a consistent manner. The induced vibration signals are collected via piezoceramic sensors bonded onto the pipe and flange. These signals are transferred remotely by a wireless data acquisition module and then processed with a code developed in-house in the MATLAB environment. After normalization and filtering of the signals, the empirical mode decomposition is applied to establish an effective energy-based damage index. The assessment of the damage indices thus obtained for the various scenarios verifies the integrity of the proposed methodology for identifying the damage and its progression in bolted joints as well as the major enhancements applied onto the methodology.