• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.151-156
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• 1994

Exertion has been made to develop high-temperature (about $250{\sim}650^{\circ}C$) immersion ultrasonic sensor for the visualization of objects, temperature measurement, dimensional check, or nondestructive testing of welds under liquid sodium. In this study, the feasibility of the ultrasonic sensor taking advantage of a strip waveguide was confirmed by water-experiment. The lowest order of antisymmetric Lamb wave was used in the frequency range with negligible dispersion. This plate wave was excited in the stainless steel strip waveguide of 1.0mm thickness and 13mm width by the comb-structure transducer of 2.3MHz frequency. Its attenuation coefficient was 1.2dB/m in air and 380dB/m in water. The signal to noise ratio of 25dB was obtained from a planar reflector 270mm away from the beam aperture of $13mm{\times}39mm$ size.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.118-128
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• 1999

There are many ultrasonic measurement methods that are used in nondestructive testing applications. Some typical applications include material property determination, microstructural characterization. and flaw detection. Ultrasonic parameters such as velocity and attenuation are most commonly required in these applications. The accuracy and repeatability of testing results are dependent on both the hardware used to generate and receive the ultrasonic waves and on the analysis software for calculating these parameters. In this study, five analysis algorithms were implemented on a computer for measuring wave speed in a pulse echo. immersion testing configuration. In velocity measurements comparisons were made between the overlap. cross-correlation. Fourier transform. Hilbert transform, wavelet transform algorithms. Velocity measurement was applied to an isotropic steel sample using the five analysis algorithms. Frequency-dependent phase/group velocity and attenuation were also measured using the Fourier transform and wavelet transform algorithms on a composite laminate containing voids.

• 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.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.35 no.5
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• pp.299-306
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• 2015

A conventional phased array system can control an ultrasonic beam electronically by adjusting the excitation time delay of individual elements in a multi-element probe and produce an ultrasonic image. In Contrast, full matrix capture (FMC) is a data acquisition process that allows receiving ultrasonic signals from one single shot of the phased array transducer element through all the other elements and captures the complete dataset from every possible transmit-receive combination. This FMC data can be used to create the ultrasonic image in post processing. It is possible to produce not only images equivalent to conventional phased array image but also total focusing method (TFM) images with improved resolution and sharpness, which is virtually focused at any point in a region of interest. In this paper, the system that can perform FMC by using a conventional phased array instrument is developed, and a study was conducted on the imaging algorithms to reconstruct sector B-scan and TFM images from FMC dataset.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.36 no.6
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• pp.474-482
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• 2016

A Kelvin foam plate - widely used in the energy and transport industries as a lightweight structural material - was examined to estimate its Young's modulus using ultrasound. An isotropic tetrakaidecahedron foam structure was designed in SolidWorks and printed using 3D printer with an ABS plastic material. The 3D printed foam structure was used to build a foam plate with a 14 mm thickness ($50mm{\times}100mm$ in size) for the ultrasonic test. The Kelvin foam plate, a significantly porous medium, was completely filled with paraffin wax to enable the ultrasound to penetrate through the porous medium. The acoustic wave velocity of the wax-filled Kelvin foam was measured using the time of flight (TOF) method. Furthermore, the elastic modulus of the Kelvin foam was estimated based on an elastic structural model developed in this study. The Young's modulus of the produced Kelvin foam was observed to be approximately 3.4% of the bulk value of the constituent material (ABS plastic). This finding is consistent with experimental and theoretical results reported by previous studies.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.13-20
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• 2017

A conventional phased array ultrasonic system offers the ability to steer an ultrasonic beam by applying independent time delays of individual elements in the array and produce an ultrasonic image. In contrast, full matrix capture (FMC) is a data acquisition process that collects a complete matrix of A-scans from every possible independent transmit-receive combination in a phased array transducer and makes it possible to reconstruct various images that cannot be produced by conventional phased array with the post processing as well as images equivalent to a conventional phased array image. In this paper, a basic algorithm based on the LLL mode total focusing method (TFM) that can image crack type flaws is described. And this technique was applied to reconstruct flaw images from the FMC dataset obtained from the experiments and ultrasonic simulation.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.420-425
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• 1999

Time of flight diffraction(TOFD) method is used in nondestructive tests of piping and pressure vessels because of its advantages over a pulse echo technique: its speed, objectivity, repeatability and its insensitivity to specimen surface conditions and discontinuity orientation. But it is the one of weak points in TOFD method that it has the dead zone in sub-surface resolution induced by lateral waves. We solved the dead-zone problem near the sub-surface by using the deconvolution method and the developed ultrasonic testing system showed high performance.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.273-280
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• 2016

The simulation of nondestructive testing has been used in the prediction of the signal characteristics of various defects and in the development of the procedures. CIVA, a simulation tool dedicated to nondestructive testing, has good accuracy and speed, and provides a three-dimensional graphical user interface for improved visualization and familiar data displays consistent with an NDE technique. Even though internal validations have been performed by the CIVA software development specialists, an independent validation study is necessary for the assessment of the accuracy of the software prior to practical use. In this study, time of flight diffraction signals of ultrasonic inspection of a calibration block for reactor vessel head penetrations were simulated using CIVA. The results were compared to the experimentally inspected signals. The accuracy of the simulated signals and the possible range for simulation were verified. It was found that, there is a good agreement between the CIVA simulated and experimental results in the A-scan signal, B-scan image, and measurement of depth.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.347-355
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• 1999

A feasibility investigation on vibration-based nondestructive evaluation of thermal stress-induced micro-failure in the free edge region of thin composite laminates(1mm thick) has been carried out. The failure occurrence and damage zone, which were predicted by the three-dimensional finite-element thermal stress analysis, were observed using the ultrasonic C-scan and optical microscopy. Analysis of the vibration spectrum measured from the laminate beam specimens by the vibration sweep test exhibited that the obvious decrease in resonancy frequency and some considerable increase in damping factor were associated with the micro-failure formation. The vibration technique utilizing short beam and high resonant frequency was found to be very sensitive to the thermal stress-induced damage in the thin laminates.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.152-162
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• 2001

Laser-generated ultrasonic technique which is one of the reliable nondestructive evaluation techniques has been applied to evaluate the integrity of structures by analyzing the characteristics of signal obtained from surface crack. Therefore, the signal analysis of the laser-generated ultrasonics is absolutely necessary for the accurate and quantitative estimation of the surface defects. In this study, one-sided measurement by laser-generated ultrasonic has been applied to evaluate the depth of the surface-breaking crack in the materials. However, since the ultrasonic waveform excited by pulse laser is very difficult to distinguish the defect signals, it is necessary to consider the signal analyses of the transient waveform. Wavelet Transform(WT) is a powerful tool for processing transient signals with temporally varying spectra that helps to resolve high and low frequency transient components effectively. In this paper, the analyses of the surface-breaking crack of the ultrasonic signal excited by pulse laser are presented by employing the WT analyses.