Although ultrasonic-based techniques are the most widely used ones for the assessment of pipeline integrity they have some limitations, and alternative methods show potential to overcome them, such as laser scanning techniques. This paper presents the results of an experimental evaluation of pulse-echo ultrasonic and laser scanning techniques for pipeline inspection using a metal specimen which represents a damaged pipeline. Both techniques were able to detect all the defects on the inner surface of the specimen, but the defect geometry was important to define the accuracy of each technique. For almost all the evaluated defects, the differences between the reference and the three-dimensional representations created from the experimental data showed that the ultrasonic technique presented errors with magnitude around 0.2 mm, which is in general half the error observed for the laser scanning technique. However, ultrasonic technique demanded 8 h for specimen inspection, while laser technique required only 10 min.

尽管基于超声的技术是评估管道完整性的最广泛使用的技术，但它们仍有一些局限性，而替代方法显示出克服这些技术的潜力，例如激光扫描技术。本文介绍了脉冲回波超声和激光扫描技术在管道检测中使用代表损坏管道的金属标本进行实验评估的结果。两种技术都能够检测出样本内表面上的所有缺陷，但是缺陷的几何形状对于定义每种技术的准确性很重要。对于几乎所有评估的缺陷，参考值和根据实验数据创建的三维表示之间的差异表明，超声技术呈现的误差约为0.2毫米，这通常是激光扫描技术所观察到的误差的一半。但是，超声技术需要8小时进行标本检查，而激光技术仅需要10分钟。