Methodology for removing fouling within liquid-filled pipelines based on ultrasonic guided waves cavitation effect

Pipelines have advantages in fluid transportation, which play an important role in the rise of economy and social development. However, fouling in pipelines is an important issue that must be paid attention to by oil, gas, food and many other industries. These related industries need to remove fouling and even replace pipes regularly due to the generation of fouling. If the descaling operation is not timely or improper, it will lead to pipeline deformation, leakage or even burst. Thus, an environmentally friendly descaling methodology is proposed in this paper, which is based on ultrasonic guided waves cavitation effect. Two descaling scenarios, single transducer case and the transducer array one, are studied through the modeling work and compared in the experiments, which show that the ultrasonic guided waves excited by the piezoelectric transducers can remove fouling effectively and descaling effect of the latter case is cleaner than the former one. The average descaling rates of two descaling system are up to 82.49% and 94.61% respectively.