Ultrasonic unilateral double-position excitation lamb wave defect detection and quantification method for ground electrode of transmission tower

The power transmission tower’s ground electrode defect will affect its normal current dispersion function and threaten the power system’s safe and stable operation and even personal safety. Aiming at the problem that the buried grounding grid is difficult to be detected, this paper proposes a method for identifying the ground electrode defects of transmission towers based on single-side multi-point excited ultrasonic guided waves. The geometric model, ultrasonic excitation model, and physical model are established, and the feasibility of ultrasonic guided wave detection is verified through the simulation and experiment. In actual inspection, it is equally important to determine the specific location of the defect. Therefore, a multi-point excitation method is proposed to determine the defect’s actual position by combining the ultrasonic guided wave signals at different excitation positions. Besides, the precise quantification of flat steel grounding electrode defects is achieved through the feature extraction-neural network method. Field test results show that, compared with the commercial double-sided excitation transducer, the single-sided excitation transducer proposed in this paper has a lower defect quantization error in defect quantification. The average quantization error is reduced by approximately 76%.