The invention discloses a wave beam time-delay control-based helical weld pipe twisting guided wave detection method and device. The method comprises calculating helical weld pipe guided wave dispersion characteristics by a semi-analytical finite element method, calculating twisting guided wave frequency and a wave rate of a parallel helical weld, arranging multiple magnetostrictive transducers at equal intervals along a circumferential direction to obtain an annular magnetostrictive twisting guided wave transducer array, after time-delay excited guided waves of all channels are transmitted along an axial direction and are reflected by defects, receiving the excited guided waves by all channels of the annular magnetostrictive twisting guided wave transducer array, carrying out synthesis to obtain a detection signal, determining defect positions according defect wave packets, and determining the optimal twisting guided wave detection frequency and a corresponding signal by frequency sweeping according to a signal-to-noise ratio. The method and device eliminate helical weld signal continuous echoing in guided wave detection adopting the annular integrated magnetostrictive tranducer, improve a signal-to-noise ratio of guided wave echoing and realize easy extraction of a small defect signal.