Automatic Guided Waves Data Transmission System Using an Oil Industry Multiwire Cable Alternative wireless data communication systems are a necessity in industries that operate in harsh environments such as the oil and gas industry. Ultrasonic guided wave propagation through solid metallic structures, such as metal barriers, rods, and multiwire cables, have been proposed for data transmission purposes. In this context, multiwire cables have been explored as a communication media for the transmission of encoded ultrasonic guided waves. This work presents the proprietary hardware design and implementation of an automatic data transmission system based on the propagation of ultrasonic guided waves using as communication channels a hightemperature and corrosionresistant oil industry multiwire cable. A dedicated communication protocol has been implemented at physical and data link layers, which involved pulse position modulation (PPM), digital signal processing (DSP), and an integrity validation byte. The data transmission system was composed of an ultrasonic guided waves PPM encoded data transmitter, a 1K22 MP35N multiwire cable, a hardware preamplifier, a data acquisition module, a realtime (RT) DSP LabVIEW (National Instruments, Austin, TX) based demodulator, and a humanmachine interface (HMI) running on a personal computer. To evaluate the communication system, the transmitter generated 60 kHz PPM energy packets containing three different bytes and their corresponding integrity validation bytes. Experimental tests were conducted in the laboratory using 1 and 10 m length cables. Although a dispersive solid elastic media was used as a communication channel, results showed that digital data transmission rates, up to 470 bps, were effectively validated.

The Design and Verification of an Active SAMSR Ultrasonic Guided Wave Monitoring System with UltraLow Crosstalk Due to long propagation distance and high sensitivity to a variety of damages, ultrasonic guided wave technologies have been widely applied in the damage detection or health monitoring of pipe networks and large platelike structures. However, there are two important problems to be solved when applying this technology; namely, the large scanning time required for monitoring largescaled structures and the serious crosstalk between the actuation and receiving signals, especially when monitoring hotspot regions. Therefore, this study mainly designed key parts, such as the matrix switcher and attenuation circuit. The singleactuation and multiplesimultaneousreception (SAMSR) mechanism based on an analog switching matrix and a low noise charge amplifier circuit was designed and integrated with the SPI control bus to shorten the scanning time. Moreover, a twostage attenuation circuit with an interlocking isolation structure is presented to effectively isolate the receiving signals from the actuation signals to obtain ultralow crosstalk even under a high voltage actuation source. In this study, the designed matrix switcher and other components were integrated into the developed ultrasonic guided wave monitoring system. Several experiments were conducted on a stiffened composite structure to illustrate the effectivity of the developed SAMSR ultrasonic guided wave system by comparing the signals collected with those from a commercial ultrasonic guided wave system.