Ultrasonic NDT and Imaging of Centrifugally Cast Stainless Steel Samples
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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
Centrifugally cast stainless steel (CCSS) components are currently being used in many critical industrial applications such as nuclear reactors, which have stringent inspection requirements. Non-destructive testing (NDT) of these components are governed by strict guidelines to insure safe operating conditions. Current literature indicates that ultrasonic NDT techniques provide potentially the most promising and reliable methods for the inspection of CCSS components. However, the received signal often has low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) due to ultrasonic attenuation caused by grain scattering. Furthermore, ultrasonic inspection of CCSS components is plagued by high attenuation, velocity variations, mode conversion, beam divergence and/or convergence, and skewing. Therefore, the signals arising from metallurgical discontinuities or defects caused by thermal fatigue and stress corrosion, can appear to a manual ultrasonic inspector as random, stationary-noise signals. The ability to detect such defects is at best limited with the conventional non-destructive evaluation techniques. In this paper, some spectral methods are presented to improve flaw visibility by reducing the background noise from the CCSS microstructure.