A Guide To Using Ultrasound For Leak

Detection And Condition Monitoring

By Thomas J. Murphy and Allan A. Rienstra

 Presents...

You have received a chapter of

HEAR MORE
by Thomas J. Murphy and Allan A. Rienstra

The use of airborne ultrasound by a

wide array of manufacturing has led
many to dub ultrasound a predictive
maintenance tool for the masses. It
is a technology with mass appeal, a
wide range of applications, and a cost
entry point that makes it accessible to
practically anyone.
In this book, the authors guide you
through the technology step by step,
with each chapter dedicated to an
application and how the technology
applies to that application. You will
learn how the inspection should
be carried out, along with real-life
examples of how these applications
are currently being applied.

To order this book, go to The MRO-Zone Bookstore website:

http://mro-zone.com
Chapter 1: Introduction

Knowledge of the existence of sound beyond the range of human hearing has
been around since the late 18th century when it was discovered that bats use
hearing rather than vision to navigate.

In 1881, Pierre Curie reported his discovery of the piezoelectric effect—a

discovery which was vital to the world of vibration and ultrasound. The large
majority of sensors (and transmitters in the case of ultrasound) used in vibration
and ultrasound applications use piezoelectric crystals as the transducer which
converts motion into voltage or vice versa. Without piezoelectricity, we would
be left with moving coils, moving magnets, and little else.

After the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, there was great interest in developing
a technique which could be used to detect icebergs. This stimulus gave us the
hydrophone. A hydrophone is basically an underwater microphone. It detects
sound travelling through water and converts the acoustic pressure into a voltage
which can be processed or listened to.

The next logical stage of development for the hydrophone was to use an
ultrasound sensor. By 1916, this ultrasonic device was being used to hunt
submarines. In the very early days, this was accomplished by listening for the
noise they made as they travelled through the water.

The parallel development of sonar (Sound Navigation and Ranging), first

patented just after the sinking of the Titanic, copied the navigation of bats, using
hydrophones to generate sounds and pick up the reflection of those sounds to
calculate depth and bearing.

Medical applications of ultrasound began to be reported in the 1930’s. You are

probably aware of the use of ultrasound in obstetrics. However, medical and
biomedical applications go far beyond this small area and include its use in the
areas of soft body tissue inspection and repair, heart, kidney and liver, muscles,

5
Hear More

ligaments and tendons. Because ultrasound is live and available in real time, it
is often used to guide interventional procedures such as fine needle operations.

The development of portable ultrasound equipment for airborne leak detection

started in the late ‘60s and early ’70s. This gave birth to the use of this technology
as a maintenance tool.

When compared with the two big PdM players of infrared and vibration,
ultrasound has a much larger range of application both inside PdM and
beyond—airborne/contact, rotating/non-rotating, predictive, energy, quality,
safety, industrial, marine and power transmission are just some of the many
areas of application.

Despite almost forty years of sales, marketing, and technical development,

ultrasound has been quite slow to gain acceptance. The rise in popularity of
airborne ultrasound for use in predictive maintenance programs in the last
ten years can be attributed to three factors: ease of use, versatility, and low
implementation cost.

Once considered a companion technology to core predictive tools such as

vibration and infrared analysis, you now see the emergence of stand-alone
ultrasound inspection programs as standard practice for maintenance
departments around the globe. Ultrasound is now considered a front-line
defense system in the everyday battle for manufacturing uptime. The use of
airborne ultrasound by a wide array of manufacturing, from mining to power
generation and from waste management to food production, has led many to
dub ultrasound a predictive maintenance tool for the masses. It is a technology
with mass appeal, a wide range of applications, and a cost entry point that makes
it accessible to practically anyone.

The purpose of this book is to inform. We want to open your eyes to the vast
range of possibilities for using this technology, and along the way correct a few
false truths. To accomplish our objective, we chose to lay out this book in much
the same manner we would teach the technology to an aspiring ultrasound
inspector. As you work your way through the wonders of this technology, you
will no doubt realize that it can be used every day of the week for a different

6
 Introduction

type of job. Therefore, each chapter is dedicated to an application, with a focus

on how the technology applies to that application. You will learn how the
inspection should be carried out, and then read one, two, or three examples
of how these applications are currently being applied in interesting ways, by
interesting people—your peers and colleagues, in interesting factories—both
stationary and moving, around the globe.

7
Chapter 2: Principles of Sound

In this chapter we will discuss:

• What is sound
• What is ultrasound
• How sound and ultrasound are measured
• How the properties of sound change with frequency

Sound and the behavior of sound, acoustics, is a vast and complex subject.
Attempts in the past to simplify and ignore some basic fundamentals have
resulted in misconceptions, mistakes, and errors. In a world where the old
saying, “A bad workmen always blames his tools!” is commonplace, it is not
surprising that “ultrasound doesn’t work” is heard too often.

Since acoustical terms are used in many walks of life, frequently multiple words,
from different sources, are used for the same parameter. For example, in music
you might refer to the pitch of a sound. Pitch is the musical term for frequency.

So let’s go back to the basics.

Sound
Sound is a mechanical wave. It is not an electromagnetic wave like light or radio.
It requires a medium through which to travel and cannot exist in a vacuum.

Sound is a pressure wave. It is a longitudinal wave. The wave propagation is

along it like the motion of a slinky or a worm.

9
Hear More

LONGITUDINAL PRESSURE WAVE

Energy Wave Particle Movement Direction

This motion produces areas of higher and lower pressure which is referred to
as compressions and rarefactions. It is these pressure fluctuations that you can
hear and measure.

AREAS OF COMPRESSION AND RAREFACTION

Compression Rarefaction

If a transducer were used to detect fluctuations in pressure as the sound wave

impinged upon the device, it would detect a high pressure which corresponds
to the compression region and a low pressure corresponding to the rarefaction.

10
 Principles of Sound

A Sine wave, or sinusoidal sound, is one in which there is only one frequency
present—also known as a pure tone. Connect this pressure transducer to an
oscilloscope and you would see the repeating increase and decrease in pressure
of the sound wave.

AREAS OF COMPRESSION AND

RAREFACTION IN A SINE WAVE

Pressure Time

C = compression R = rarefaction

In a rather human-centric manner, sound is generally split into three ranges:

• The audible range which you can hear: 20-20,000 Hz
• The infrasound range: below 20 Hz
• The ultrasound range: above 20,000 Hz (which is of interest to us)

Ultrasound
Ultrasound is nominally all sound above 20 kHz. Medical applications of
ultrasound often work at several megahertz, but for our applications, you will
normally be using a frequency range around the 36–40 kHz region.

We need to quantify sound both in terms of the frequency content and the
amplitude.

11
Hear More

Frequency
One parameter that is used is wavelength. The wavelength of a sound is a
measurement of length and is the distance between two repeating points in a
signal.

WAVELENGTH AND PERIOD

The frequency of sound is measured in units of Hertz (Hz) and ultrasound in

units of thousands of Hertz (kHz). Another term used is period. The period
of a signal is the reciprocal of its frequency. Where frequency is how many
times something happens per second, period is how many seconds it takes for
something to happen once. 60Hz means 60 times per second. At 60Hz, an
individual event would take place in 1/60th of a second.

12
 Principles of Sound

Amplitude and Decibels

The measurement of amplitude in the case of sound is slightly more complicated

than the measurement of amplitude in vibration. This is because in sound a
decibel scale is used.

If this were not complicated enough, there are actually two decibel scales—one
is used for the measurement of acoustical sound and a slightly different one for
ultrasound, which is actually a measurement of voltage rather than sound itself.

The decibel scale is a ratio scale. You do not measure an absolute value. Instead,
you scale that value comparatively against some other reference point.

This is similar to the measurement of acceleration in the world of vibration. The

majority of the world does not measure acceleration in the correct SI unit of
m/s², or even the correct imperial unit of ft/s², but instead uses the unit of g,
thereby comparing all acceleration levels to the reference value of earth’s gravity.
A signal of 120m/s² would nominally be said to be 12g.

In radio, and mobile telephony, the measurement of signal strength is the dBm,
a comparison between the actual signal strength and what that signal strength
would be if you were 1 metre from the antenna.

In the world of electronics and ultrasound, the dBµV is used—all amplitudes

are compared with a reference value of 1µV. A signal of 120µV would nominally
be described as 120x bigger than our reference 1µV.

One key point should fall out of this discussion. It is absolutely meaningless to
quote a ratio without a reference, and it is equally meaningless to quote a dB
value without its reference. Simply saying something is so many dBs conveys
little or no useful information without that reference. 20dBV and 20dBµV are
different by a factor of 1 million, a difference which is not conveyed if you simply
say 20dB.

It is equally false to infer that the higher the unreferenced dB reading, the more
sensitive the system is. If you measure 20dBµV and then change the reference
to 1nV instead of 1µV, your 20 dBµV would instantly become 80dBnV. Is your

13
Hear More

measurement chain in any way, shape, or form more sensitive? No, you have
merely changed the scale you are using to give you a bigger number.

If this were not confusing enough, we now add more confusion by making this
scale logarithmic. The expression used is:
dB = 20log10 (V1/V0) where in our case V0 is 1µV

Examples:
• A ratio or factor of 10 (i.e. x10)
h The 20log10(10) = 20 x 1 = 20dB
• A ratio or factor of 100 (i.e. x100)
h The 20log10(100) = 20 x 2 = 40dB
• A ratio or factor of 1000 (i.e. x1000)
h The 20log10(1000) = 20 x 3 = 60dB

Note the additive property of logs:

• x1,000 = x10x100 = 20dB + 40dB = 60dB

Another common ratio is x2

• log10(2)=0.301

So a doubling of the amplitude of an ultrasound signal would become:

• 20log10(2) = 20 x 0.301 = 6dB

Similarly:
• x4 = x2x2 = 6+6 = 12dB

Finally, take an example of 52dB:

1. 52dB = 40dB + 12dB
2. Where 40dB = x100
3. And 12dB = x4
4. So, 40dB+12dB is the same as x100x4 which = x400
5. So, 52dB is a ratio or factor of 400

14
 Principles of Sound

It is very important to keep in mind that you NEVER multiply or divide dBs.
They are logarithmic values and should only be added or subtracted.

To say, for example, that 36dBµV is twice as big as 18dBµV is nonsense. The
difference between these two values is 18dBµV which corresponds to a ratio of
7.9. So the voltage amplitude of a signal of 36dBµV is not 2 times higher than the
voltage amplitude of a signal of 18dBµV, it is, in fact, 7.9 times higher!

Let’s apply this to a bearing:

1. In January, bearing “A” was measured with an ultrasound detector and the
value was 10 dBµV.
2. In April, that same bearing measured 62 dBµV.
3. 62dBµV – 10dBµV = 52dBµV (factor of 400).
4. Therefore, from January to April, the ultrasonic signal from bearing “A”
increased by a factor of 400—probably the bearing is already broken.

As stated earlier, when you multiply in normal numbers, you add the exponents.
It is therefore reasonable, without going through the proofs, that when you
divide, you subtract.

So -6dB is ½ and -52dB would be a reduction by a factor of 400, i.e. 1/400th.

Some Simple Log Voltage Relationships:

2x = 6dB 10x = 20dB
½ = -6dB 100x = 40dB
4x = 2x2x = 6dB+6dB = 12dB
¼ = -12dB

One final absurdity, which has crept in to so many mechanical measurement

methods used in predictive maintenance, is the insistence on measurement to
one or more decimal places.

For example, 60dBµV corresponds to 1,000µV while 59.9dBµV corresponds

to 988.553µV. Is this difference significant? To achieve repeatability in a
mechanical measurement in ultrasound (just like in vibration) of better than

15
Hear More

10% requires great luck, skill and/or control. ±5% in voltage terms corresponds
to ±0.4dB, and a more realistic ±10% in voltage terms corresponds to ±0.8dB.
Achieving measurement repeatability of 0.5dBµV or so is quite acceptable.

Look-up Table of dB to Factor Converstions:

dB Value Factor of
2 1.3
4 1.6
6 2.0
8 2.5
10 3.2
12 4.0
16 6.3
18 7.9
20 10.0
22 12.6
24 15.8
26 20.0
28 25.1
30 31.6
32 39.8
34 50.1
36 63.1
38 79.4
40 100.0
42 125.9
44 158.5
46 199.5
48 251.2
50 316.2
52 398.1
54 501.2
Using this table, you could now say that our earlier example of 120µV equates to a decibel value of
roughly 42dBµV.

16
 Check Out Our
Website!

Thank you for downloading a Chapter of

HEAR MORE
by Thomas J. Murphy and Allan A. Rienstra

Purchase this book, go to The MRO-Zone Bookstore website:

http://mro-zone.com
Hear More: A Guide To Using Ultrasound For Leak Detection And Condition Monitoring
By Thomas J. Murphy and Allan A. Rienstra