Recent Progress on Nonlinear Ultrasonic Testing for Materials Aging in Nuclear Applications
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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
Materials in nuclear power plants are subjected to a variety of time-dependent aging phenomena, depending on their environmental conditions. In many cases, such phenomena cause microstructural changes in the materials before the development of macro scale damage or, eventually, component failure. Nonlinear ultrasonic testing has the potential to probe microstructural characteristics of materials that have undergone aging related changes and can potentially be used to establish structure-property relationships or predict where macro scale damage (e.g., cracking) is likely to occur. In this talk, recent work relating measured material nonlinearity to microstructural changes encountered in nuclear power applications is presented, specifically radiation damage in ferritic steels and weld sensitization in austenitic stainless steels. In the case of radiation damage, it has been established that the formation of BCC Cu nanoprecipitates and changes in dislocation density affect the material nonlinearity. In nonlinearity measurements in the case of weld sensitization (migration of Cr to grain boundaries in the heat affected zone, affecting the local corrosion resistance), it is thought formation of M23C6 carbides at the grain boundaries affects the measured material nonlinearity. Preliminary results are presented.