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Modelling pulse-echo ultrasonic data

Anja Diez, Tonni F. Johansen (SINTEF), Erlend M. Viggen (NTNU)
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Ultrasonic pulse echo measurements are used for well-integrity measurements, determining the material properties (impedance) of the material behind the pipe. The circular transducer inside the pipe requires a 3D model geometry. We found that reducing the model to a 2D axisymmetric model, by modelling the transducer geometry correctly but the pipe geometry as a spherical shell, can be a valuable step to reduce computation time [1]. Here we present the 3D COMSOL model and 2D axisymmetric COMSOL model. The models make use of the time explicit domain for efficient modelling of high frequencies and materials with significant variation in impedance and, therefore, grid size. These COMSOL models have been used to build a dataset [2] of pulse echo responses for a range of geometry and material variations [3] to allow for parameter studies.

[1] Diez, A., Johansen, TF., Viggen, EM., From 3D to 1D: Effective numerical modelling of pulse-echo measurements in pipes. Proceedings of the 46th Scandinavian Symposium on Physical Acoustics. (2023), p. 1–23, ISBN 978-82-8123-023-1
[2] Diez, A; Viggen, E.M.; Johansen, T.F. (2024), “Simulated ultrasonic pulse-echo well-integrity dataset”, Mendeley Data, V1, doi: 10.17632/3bs65nzpv2.1
[3] Diez, A., Viggen, E.M. & Johansen, T.F. Ultrasonic pulse-echo dataset from numerical modelling for oil and gas well integrity investigations. Sci Data 12, 544 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04851-x

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