Ultrasonic Evaluation and Imaging of Tube Closure Welds
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Begun in 1973, the Review of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation (QNDE) is the premier international NDE meeting designed to provide an interface between research and early engineering through the presentation of current ideas and results focused on facilitating a rapid transfer to engineering development.
This site provides free, public access to papers presented at the annual QNDE conference between 1983 and 1999, and abstracts for papers presented at the conference since 2001.
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Abstract
Tube closure welds, commonly called pinch welds, are made by solid state upset welding, where quality assurance consists of process control and geometric feature verification. Ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation demonstrated the feasibility for sorting oxide contaminated pinch welds from clean welds. Until now contaminated pinch welds could only be detected by destructive testing. Two approaches are presented in this paper. First, a study was conducted to detect the variation in the ultrasonic signal caused by interaction with the pinch weld. Correlations between the good and bad welds were accomplished with feature extraction and pattern recognition techniques. The second approach involved high resolution scanning of the pinch weld with an acoustic microscope. The acoustic microscope produced excellent color images of the weld which clearly distinguished the pre-weld cleanliness.