• Journal of Energy Engineering
• /
• v.25 no.4
• /
• pp.103-109
• /
• 2016

Polyethylene pipes has useful benefits which are anti-corrosive and flexible material, so it is used to gas pipes but also class 3 water pipes of nuclear power plant, process pipes of petrochemical plant and chemical plant. So the usage of polyethylene pipes is widely increased. But it has been limited for the usage of polyethylene, because it can not be directly detected to fusion joints by using non destructive evaluation. Polyethylene pipes are connected by two methods, one is butt fusion and the other is electrofusion. Butt fusion is widely used to connecting the pipes. It is proposed to method for determining the reliability of joints in this study that is detection of the melt flow zone at fusion joints. In this study, middle density polyethylene is used, outside diameter of the test specimen is 225mm and thickness is 20.5mm. Speed of ultrasonic of this test specimen is 2,200m/s. Test specimens were fabricated by varying the heating time which means from 0% to 130% applying time through heating plate to polyethylene for detecting melt flow zone. Also 4 additional test specimens were made, one was made that not scrapping attached surface of pipes but applying 100% of the proper heating time and the others were made to include of soil, gravel and vinly tape paper at fusion joints, that were also applied 100% of proper heating time. Ultrasonic testing to measure the melt flow zone of 20 test specimens was conducted by using 3.5MHz and 5.0MHz ultrasonic probes and melt flow zone measuring was conducted to three times at different point to one specimen. To differentiate the melt flow zone signal, post image processing was equally conducted to all test results and image levels, contrast, sharpen, threshold were adopted to all teat results and the test results were displayed gray scale. From the results, for the shorter heating times the reflection area of multiple echo have been increased, so the data was obtained from the position where it can be eliminated as much as possible. At 80% of proper heating time(168 sec.), the signal of melt flow zone was obtained clearly, so measuring could be conducted. From 7% of proper heating time(15 sec.) to shorter heating times. we could not obtain the signal because test specimen was not fused. From the result, we can verify that measuring of melt flow zone by using phased array ultrasonic imaging method is possible. And we can verify to complete and incomplete butt fusion by measuring the melt flow zone.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
• /
• v.30 no.5
• /
• pp.479-483
• /
• 2010

9% nickel alloy steels used for LNG, cryogenic liquid, storage tank are welded with dissimilar Inconel or Hastelloy welding rod and the weldment shows similar characteristic with the dissimilar metal weld of low carbon steel and austenitic stainless steel. Band type indications are sometimes shown on the film during radiography test of the weldments. Thus this study identified whether the indications are non-relevant indications through material, radiographic test, ultrasonic test, liquid penetrant test and microstructure analysis and also proposed radiography film interpretation and cause of band type indications.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
• /
• v.20 no.6
• /
• pp.562-567
• /
• 2000

Many pressure vessels for power and industrial plant are fabricated from low alloy carbon steels. The inner sides of pressure vessels are commonly weld-cladded with austenitic stainless steels to minimize problems of corrosive attack. Disbonding cracks are often detected at the transition region of welding interlayer, which is serious problem to reliability of pressure vessels. We have developed C-scan system to high speed inspection of overlay weld using DSP(digital signal processor). This system consists of signal processing parts (oscilloscope, pulser/receiver, digitizer, DSP), scanner, program and position controller. The developed system has been applied to a practical ultrasonic testing in overlay weld, and demonstrated high speed with precision

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
• /
• v.17 no.1
• /
• pp.11-22
• /
• 1997

It is very essential to get the accurate classification of defects in primary pressure vessel and piping welds for the safety of nuclear power plant. Ultrasonic testing has been widely applied to inspect primary pressure vessel and piping welds of nuclear power plants during PSI / ISI. Classification of flaws in weldments from their ultrasonic scattering signals is very important in quantitative nondestructive evaluation. This problem is ideally suited to a modern ultrasonic Pattern recognition technique. Here, a brief discussion on systematic approach to this methodology is presented including ultrasonic feature extraction, feature selection and classification. A stronger emphasis is placed on Fuzzy-UTSCS (UT signal classification system) as efficient classifiers for many practical classification problems. As an example Fuzzy-UTSCS is applied to classify flaws in ferrite pressure vessel weldments into two types such as linear and volumetric. It is shown that Fuzzy-UTSCS is able to exhibit higher performance than other classifiers in the defect classification.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
• /
• v.24 no.4
• /
• pp.384-389
• /
• 2004

As the increase of the operation year of nuclear power plants, the probabilities of the degradation of the major facilities and materials in the nuclear power plants are increased. The integrity of those facilities shall be monitored and verified by the non-destructive examination methods with the regulation codes, so called inservice inspection(ISI). The ISI of Yonggwang unit 6 was performed in four different parts, 1) non-destructive examinations for the components, piping weldments and structures, 2) automated ultrasonic examinations for pressure vessels, 3) visual examinations for the interior structures of the reactor, 4) eddy current examinations for the steam generator tubes. As the results, there was no severe indication and all detected indications were evaluated as non-relavent. Especially for the examinations of the piping weldments, PD(Performance Demonstration) was applied as a W examination method defined in the 1995 edition of ASME Code Sec. XI. The implementation of the PD for the piping weld results in an improvement of the reliability of the UT examinations.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
• /
• v.15 no.2
• /
• pp.378-385
• /
• 1995

The ultrasonic non-destructive testing uses the directivity of the ultrasonic pulse wave which propagates in one direction. The directivity is expressed as the relationship between the propagate direction and its sound pressure. The directivity of ultrasonic wave is closely related to determination of probe arrangement, testing sensitivity, scanning pitch and defect location and characterization. The paper measured the directivity of shear wave, which reflected from artificial defect located in weld metal zone in butt welded joint similar model made of pyrex glass by using visualization method. 2 MHz and 4 MHz angle probes were used to measure the directivity of reflection wave at the artificial defect. The directivity of shear waves reflected from the defect was different according to the probe position and the shape of butt welded joint. The difference of directivity of reflection wave was existed between 2 MHz and 4 MHz angle probes. The angle of reflection wave became equal to angle of incidence as increase of the height of excess metal.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
• /
• v.18 no.4
• /
• pp.304-312
• /
• 1998

In order to assure the reliability and integrity of structures such as bridges, Power and petrochemical plants, nondestructive evaluation techniques are recently playing more important roles. Among the various kinds of nondestructive evaluation techniques, ultrasonic technique is one of the most widely used methods for nondestructive inspection of internal defects in structures. For the reliable quantitative evaluation of internal defects from the experimental ultrasonic signals, a numerical analysis of ultrasonic scattering field due to a defect distribution is absolutely required. In this paper, the SH-wave scattering by multi-cavity defects using elastodynamic boundary element method is studied. The effects of shape of defects on transmitted and reflected fields are considered. The interaction of multi-cavity defects in 50-wave scattering is also investigated. Numerical calculation by the boundary element method has been carried out to predict near field solution of scattered fields of ultrasonic SH-wave. The presented results would be useful to improve the sensitivity of flaw defection for inverse analysis and pursue quantitative nondestructive evaluation for inverse problem.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
• /
• v.17 no.4
• /
• pp.248-261
• /
• 1997

Ultrasonic pattern recognition is the most effective approach to the problem of discriminating types of flaws in weldments based on ultrasonic flaw signals. In spite of significant progress in the research on this methodology, it has not been widely used in many practical ultrasonic inspections of weldments in industry. Hence, for the convenient application of this approach in many practical situations, we develop an intelligent ultrasonic signature classification software which can discriminate types of flaws in weldments based on their ultrasonic signals using various tools in artificial intelligence such as neural networks. This software shows the excellent performance in an experimental problem where flaws in weldments are classified into two categories of cracks and non-cracks. This performance demonstrates the high possibility of this software as a practical tool for ultrasonic flaw classification in weldments.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
• /
• v.31 no.1
• /
• pp.47-52
• /
• 2011

An electromagnetic acoustic transducer(EMAT) is a non-contact transducer which can transmit the ultrasonic guided waves into specimens without couplant. And it can easily generate specific guided waves such as SH(shear horizontal) or Lamb waves by altering the design of coil and magnet. In this study, the SH wave, which is generated by EMAT, has been applied to estimate the thickness-reduction in a steel plate. Especially, the interesting feature of the dispersive behavior in selected wave modes is used to detect the thickness-reduction. Experimental results show that the reduction-level can be quantified by the measurement of the group velocity of the wave which passes though the thinning area.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
• /
• v.13 no.3
• /
• pp.24-30
• /
• 1993

The necessity of ultrasonic inspection to detect the cracks in turbine blade is being increased as the forced outage of nuclear power plants have been occurred due to blade failure in turbine components. However, the complex blade root geometry causes the ultrasonic inspection technique not to be established yet and much effort is required to set up a more reliable inspection. In this paper, the ultrasonic inspection technique for flaw detectability, skew angle effect, identification of flaw and geometric signal have been investigated with a test block and discussed the interpretation of ultrasonic signal through the acquisition and analysis of RF waveform. The experimental results show that the proper examination procedure can be established. It is required that the skew angle is essential to decrease the effect of signals from the complex blade geometry. The present results of this study can be applied to the site inspection without blade disassembly.