Development of RFECT System for In line Inspection Robot for Unpiggable Natural Gas Pipeline
This paper focuses on the RFECT (Remote Field Eddy Current Testing) technology for use on the ILI (In Line inspection) robot platform to inspect unpiggable natural gas pipeline. An effective design for RFECT system is proposed to minimize the system architecture modification that is required in implementing large diameter of RFECT system of which sensor channel must be increased according to the increase in diameter of pipeline to be inspected. The parallel digital LIA (Lock In Amplifier) is designed considering the increase in sensor channel. The performance of proposed RFECT system is verified through the pull rig experiment including a set of artificial defects simulating metal loss on the pipeline.