Phased array ultrasonic inspection method for homogeneous tube inspection over a wide oblique angle range

Abstract

As seamless tube manufacturers push quality requirements for their products, automated phased array Rotating Tube Inspection Systems (RTIS) are now required to provide continuous NDE detection performances over a wide angular range of oblique flaws. One major impact of this new reality is a paradigm shift for the calibration method driven by the requirement to meet homogeneous detection over broad oblique flaw angle intervals, whereas standard practice only requires calibration at specific discrete angles. An innovative method specifically designed to obtain high productivity and homogeneous inspection measurements over an oblique flaw range extending from -45 to 45 degrees is presented. Experimental results from the application of the method on various tubes presenting multiple artificial flaws support the quantitative performance evaluation.

Acoustic Response of Reference Notches: Derivation of Acceptance Criteria for Automated Ultrasonic Testing Based on the Correlation Between Defect Quality and Effective Defect Size

“…With the increasing demands on the precision of testing machines, the quality of the reference defects plays an important role [10,11]. This works introduces the effective defect length and the defect homogeneity as quality parameters for a quantitative characterization.…”

“…Due to the increasing demands on the repeatability and the throughput of testing machines, the impact of the reference quality becomes relevant for the evaluation of the machine performance [10,11]. However, dedicated studies on the acoustic characterization of reference defects are scarce [12][13][14].…”