Journal of Engineering Research

The out-of-roundness, a crucial parameter of pressure vessels, significantly impacts their product quality and safety performance. Currently, its inspection in practice faces difficulties and lacks precision. Advanced photoelectric ranging technology is employed to acquire spatial data within pressure vessels, with a pivotal solution lying in addressing the issue through non-parallel axis measurement of vessel cross-sections. This approach involves mounting high-precision ranging sensors on a measuring rod that can be inserted into the vessel interior, rotating the rod once to collect data, and subsequently applying projection transformation and least squares fitting to the data to obtain the cylinder cross-section of the pressure vessel. The transformed data enable the identification of the maximum internal diameter difference, from which the out-of-roundness is calculated. In actual operating conditions, the measurement error is approximately 0.1%. Compared to existing methods using steel tapes and micrometers, this approach significantly enhances both precision and efficiency, offering a novel solution to the inspection of out-of-roundness in pressure vessels. Furthermore, it provides an accurate data foundation for the digital twinning of internal spaces within pressure vessels.

Pressure vessels; Loss of roundness rate test; Laser gauge