Predicting Gated-Peak Grain Noise Distributions for Ultrasonic Inspections of Metals

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1996
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Margetan, Frank
Yalda, Isaac
Thompson, R. Bruce
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Margetan, Frank
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Review of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation
Center for Nondestructive Evaluation

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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In ultrasonic pulse/echo inspections of metal components, defect detection can be limited by backscattered “grain noise” from the metal microstructure. The absolute level of grain noise observed in a given inspection depends on the metal microstructure and on details of the inspection system, such as the focal properties of the transducer, the spectral content of the incident sonic pulse, and the receiver amplification settings. In earlier work [1–3], we presented models which account for both measurement system and microstructural effects, and which predict certain aspects of the backscattered noise in weakly-scattering materials. For example, one of the predicted quantities is the “rms noise level”, illustrated in Fig. 1 and defined as the root-mean-squared average of the RF noise voltages seen at a fixed observation time when the transducer is scanned above the specimen. The absolute rms noise level as a function of time (or penetration depth) can be predicted from knowledge of the transducer diameter and focal length, a “reference echo” from a flat surface, and certain material properties of the specimen including its density, velocity, attenuation coefficient, and Figure-of-Merit (FOM).

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Mon Jan 01 00:00:00 UTC 1996