Olga Popovych

Project

The Fellowship supported the project “Development of an ultrasound-based fouling-monitoring solution for in-situ detection and prediction of scaling and biofilms in geothermal power plants and open cooling circuits.”
The detection of cracks and other deteriorations in tubes and pipes is an important task in many fields, and in particular in the transport of gases and fluids in the energy sector. One prominent example is non-destructive testing (NDT) to detect scaling (calcitic deposits) in geothermal power plants; another is the need to ensure high accuracy in the wall thickness of new pipes made of tungsten fibers infiltrated with liquid copper. In order to evaluate the detectability of scaling in places with limited accessibility, guided waves can be used.
An advanced approach to deal with quality control tasks is to use numerical simulations of wave propagation in such materials to help in selecting the best setup, sensor type, measurement frequency, and so on. Appropriate numerical simulation tools are available at the chair, including full-waveform inversion using the software Salvus (https://mondaic.com/). This tool can also be applied to other problems in materials testing. Mastering this tool will be one of the key points for successful NDT applications.