• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.354-360
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• 2002

The piezoelectric composites had many advantages in comparison with conventional piezoelectric ceramics and piezopolymers for ultrasonic transducers used in NDT and in medical ultrasionic imaging. The electromechanical coupling coefficient should be high and the acoustic impedance should be low in these applications. However, the cross-coupling with spurious oscillations caused by laterally running plate waves exhibited complex motions in the surface of piezoelectric composites with coarse lateral spatial scale. The thickness mode electromechanical coupling coefficient of 1-3type of piezoelectric compoistes were 0.36 to 0.64, and the acoustic impedance of them were 9.8 to 22.7 MRayl. The lateral resonance frequency of 1-3 type piezoelectric composites shifted to high frequency region with decreasing lateral spatial scale.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.34 no.6
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• pp.695-700
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• 2010

Material properties of the lock plate, which covers the gas-turbine blade, are studied using ultrasonic guided waves. The lock plate is a crucial part of a gas-turbine power plant. The wave velocity and attenuation coefficient are measured to investigate the changes in the material properties under three heat-treatment conditions. Compared to the destructive mechanical tests, the material characterization of Inconel X-750 can be performed more efficiently and nondestructively by using ultrasonic guided waves; this characterization helps identify the changes occurring in its elastic moduli and Poisson's ratio under different heat-treatment conditions. The wave velocity and hardness of Inconel X-750 are proportional to each other. This nondestructive technique for the measurement of material properties can be widely used in various industries to avoid catastrophic failure. It is also expected that the guided-wave technique can be applied as a new cost- and time-saving inspection tool for longer and wider inspection ranges.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.490-500
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• 2000

A new technique for the source location of acoustic emission (AE) in plates whose thichness are close to or thinner than the wavelength has been studied by introducing wavelet transform de-noising technique. The detected AE signals were pre-processed using wavelet transform to be decomposed into the low-frequency, high-amplitude flexural components and the high-frequency, low-amplitude extensional components. If the wavelet transform de-noising was employed, we could successfully filter out the extensional wave component, one of the critical errors of source location in plates by arrival time difference method. The accuracy of source location appeared to be significantly improved and independent of the setting of gain and threshold, plate thickness, sensor-to-sensor distance, and the relative position of source to sensors. Since the method utilizes the flexural component of relatively high amplitude, it could be applied to very large, thin-walled structures in practice.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.364-371
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• 2008

Ultrasonic waveguide sensor has been developed for under-sodium viewing of reactor internal structures of a sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR). The structure design concept of a waveguide sensor assembly was suggested and evaluated for the application in SFR. A 10 m long ultrasonic waveguide sensor assembly has been manufactured and the experimental feasibility tests were carried out. The 10 m long distance propagation performance of zero-order antisymmetric $A_0$ Lamb wave has been verified. The feasibility of ultrasonic waveguide sensor has been demonstrated by the C-scanning resolution performance test.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.26 no.4A
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• pp.587-596
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• 2006

A half portion of Korean railway bridges depends on the type of steel plate girder bridge. Since these bridges have been built in the early stage of Korean economical boom, numerous maintenance effort suffers from aging and progressive degradation issues at present. In accordance with these efforts, this paper would like to address the detailed analyses of thin steel plates with bolts in order to simulate the connection regions of steel plate girder bridge. The fundamental modal analysis, transient dynamic analysis with 3D piezoelectric element in open circuit loop and signal process with aids of TOF(time of flight) and WC(wavelet coefficient) are extensively discussed.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.10 no.6 s.52
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• pp.79-91
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• 2006

A new methodology of guided wave based nondestructive testing (NDT) is developed to detect crack damage in civil infrastructures such as steel bridges without using prior baseline data. In conventional guided wave based techniques, damage is often identified by comparing the "current" data obtained from a potentially damaged condition of a structure with the "past" baseline data collected at the pristine condition of the structure. However, it has been reported that this type of pattern comparison with the baseline data can lead to increased false alarms due to its susceptibility to varying operational and environmental conditions of the structure. To develop a more robust damage diagnosis technique, a new concept of NDT is conceived so that cracks can be detected without direct comparison with previously obtained baseline data. The proposed NDT technique utilizes the polarization characteristics of the piezoelectric wafers attached on the both sides of the thin metal structure. Crack formation creates Lamb wave mode conversion due to a sudden change in the thickness of the structure. Then, the proposed technique instantly detects the appearance of the crack by extracting this mode conversion from the measured Lamb waves even at the presence of changing operational and environmental conditions. Numerical and experimental results are presented to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed technique to crack detection.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.458-463
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• 2010

Since the acoustic nonlinearity is sensitive to the minute variation of material properties, the nonlinear ultrasonic technique(NUT) has been considered as a promising method to evaluate the material degradation or fatigue. However, there are certain limitations to apply the conventional NUT using the bulk wave to thin plates. In case of plates, the use of Lamb wave can be considered, however, the propagation characteristics of Lamb wave are completely different with the bulk wave, and thus the separate study for the nonlinearity of Lamb wave is required. For this work, this paper analyzed first the conditions of mode pair suitable for the practical application as well as for the cumulative propagation of quadratic harmonic frequency and summarized the result in for conditions; (1) phase matching, (2) non-zero power flux, (3) group velocity matching, and (4) non-zero out-of-plane displacement. Experimental results in aluminum plates showed that the amplitude of the secondary Lamb wave and nonlinear parameter growed up with increasing propagation distance at the mode pair satisfying the above all conditions and that the ration of nonlinear parameters measured in Al6061-T6 and Al1100-H15 was closed to the ratio of the absolute nonlinear parameters.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.165-170
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• 2014

Shear horizontal (SH) waves propagate as a type of plate wave in a thin sheet. The dispersion characteristics of SH waves can be used for signal analysis. Therefore, SH-waves are useful for monitoring the structural health of a thin-sheet-structure. An electromagnetic acoustic transducer (EMAT), which is a non-contact ultrasonic transducer, can generate SH-waves easily by varying the shape and array of magnets and coils. Therefore, an EMAT can be applied to an automated ultrasonic testing system for structural health monitoring. When used as a sensor, however, the EMAT has a weakness in that electromagnetic interference (EMI) noise can occur easily in the automated system because of motors and electric devices. Alternatively, a fiber optic sensor works well in the same environment with EMI noise because it uses a light signal instead of an electric signal. In this paper, a fiber Fabry-P$\acute{e}$rot interferometer (FFPI) was proposed as a sensor to receive the SH-waves generated by an EMAT. A simple test was performed to verify the performance of the FFPI sensor. It is thus shown that the FFPI can receive SH-wave signals clearly.