• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.367-373
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• 2011

Guided waves inspection techniques that are different with inspection technique by bulk waves are widely used in pipe line evaluation due to advantages of long distance inspection. However, most of pipe lines at industrial fields are buried and/or coated. In this case, due to the attenuation effect from soil and/or coating material, there are a lot of difficulty on inspection by conventional ultrasonic technique. In this paper, guided waves propagating patterns are calculated with respect to excitation mode by Normal Mode Expansion(NME). Guided waves patterns based on excited by single transducer and guided wave focusing technique have employed to analyze focusing pattern on a pipe. A longitudinal mode and high order flexural modes are used with various number of transducers to determine sensitivity. Guided waves energy excited by multi transducer with focusing algorithm was successfully focused at a desired point.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Pressure Vessels and Piping
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.29-36
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• 2010

Ultrasonic inspection of heavy walled cast austenitic stainless steel(CASS)welds is very difficult due to complex and coarse grained structure of CASS material. The large size of anisotropic grain strongly affects the propagation of ultrasound by severe attenuation, change in velocity, and scattering of ultrasonic energy. therefore, the signal patterns originated from flaws can be difficult to distinguish from scattered signals. To improve detection and sizing capability of ID connected defect for heavy walled CASS piping welds, the low frequency segmented TRL Pulse Echo and Phased Array probe has been developed. The experimental studies have been performed using CASS pipe mock-up block containing artificial reflectors(ID connected EDM notch). The automatic pulse echo and phase array technique is applied the detection and the length sizing of the ID connected artificial reflectors and the results for detection and sizing has been compared respectively. The goal of this study is to assess a newly developed ultrasonic probe to improve the detection ability and the sizing of the crack in coarse-grained CASS components.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Pressure Vessels and Piping
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.40-45
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• 2008

There exist many types of pipe and component fatigue through vibrations, thermal fatigues or shifting. In some cases of thermal stratification/thermal fatigue, pipes & components are receiving thermal stress by means of material expansion and shrinkage by continuous thermal repetitive variation. Small cracks initially occur on the inside surface by thermal stress. These cracks grow in depth the pipe wall and finally come to a rupture. Pipe parts of susceptibility to thermal stratification and thermal fatigue are now being examined by conventional UT(ultrasonic test) as volumetric examination. It is difficult to fully satisfy the code & standards requirements because 3" weldolet weldments of RCS 16" pipe to 3" branch connection lines have complex structural shape. To solve the problems of conventional UT examination, we made a realistic mock-up and UT calibration block. We performed a simulation of phased array UT utilizing CIVA as NDE(Non-Destructive Examination) simulation software. Also we designed phased array UT transducer and wedge, optimal frequency by using simulation data. We performed phased array UT experiment through mock-up including artificial flaws(notch). The phased array UT technique is finally developed to improve the reliability of ultrasonic test at RCS 16" pipe to 3" branch connection weld.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.436-442
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• 2008

Graphite material has been recognized as a very competitive candidate for reflector, moderator, and structural material for very high temperature reactor (VHTR). Since VHTR is operated up to $900-950^{\circ}C$, small amount of impurity may accelerate the oxidation and degradation of carbon graphite, which results in increased porosity and lowered fracture toughness. In this study, ultrasonic wave propagation properties were investigated for both as-received and degradated material, and the feasibility of ultrasonic testing (UT) was estimated based on the result of ultrasonic property measurements. The ultrasonic properties of carbon graphite were half, more than 5 times, and 1/3 for velocity, attenuation, and signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio respectively. Degradation reduces the ultrasonic velocity slightly by 100 m/s, however the attenuation is about 2 times of as-receive state. The results of probability of detection (POD) estimation based on S/N ratio for side-drilled-hole (SDHs) of which depths were less than 100 mm were merely affected by oxidation and degradation. This result suggests that UT would be reliable method for nondestructive testing of carbon graphite material of which thickness is not over 100 mm. In accordance with the result produced by commercial automated ultrasonic testing (AUT) system, human error of ultrasonic testing is barely expected for the material of which thickness is not over 80 mm.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.351-364
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• 2002

Conventional 3D ultrasound imaging using mechanical ID arrays suffers from poor elevation resolution due to the limited depth-of-focus (DOF). On the other hand, 3D imaging systems using 2D phased arrays have a large number of active channels and hence require a very expensive and bulky beamforming hardware. To overcome these limitations, a new real-time volumetric imaging method using curved 2-D arrays is presented, in which a small subaperture, consisting of 256 elements, moves across the array surface to scan a volume of interest. For this purpose, a 2-D curved array is designed which consists of 90$\times$46 elements with 1.5λ inter-element spacing and has the same view angles along both the lateral and elevation directions as those of a commercial mechanical 1-D array. In the proposed method, transmit and receive subapertures are constructed by cutting the four corners of a rectangular aperture to obtain a required image qualify with a small number of active channels. In addition the receive subaperture size is increased by using a sparse array scheme that uses every other elements in both directions. To suppress the grating lobes elevated due to the increase in clement spacing, fold-over array scheme is adopted in transmit, which doubles the effective size of a transmit aperture in each direction. Computer simulation results show that the proposed method can provide almost the same and greatly improved resolutions in the lateral and elevation directions, respectively compared with the conventional 3D imaging with a mechanical 1-D array.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.36 no.5
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• pp.345-352
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• 2016

As aircrafts are being operated at high altitude, wing structures experience various fatigue loadings under cryogenic environments. As a result, fatigue damage such as a crack could be develop that could eventually lead to a catastrophic failure. For this reason, fatigue damage monitoring is an important process to ensure efficient maintenance and safety of structures. To implement damage detection in real-world flight environments, a special cooling chamber was built. Inside the chamber, the temperature was maintained at the cryogenic temperature, and harmonic fatigue loading was given to a wing structure. In this study, piezoelectric active-sensing based guided waves were used to detect the fatigue damage. In particular, a beamforming technique was applied to efficiently measure the scattering wave caused by the fatigue damage. The system was used for detection, growth monitoring, and localization of a fatigue crack. In addition, a sensor diagnostic process was also applied to ensure the proper operation of piezoelectric sensors. Several experiments were implemented and the results of the experiments demonstrated that this process could efficiently detect damage in such an extreme environment.