• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.174-183
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• 1997

Turbine rotor disc consists of disc, bore, keyway, hub, and rim in which the typical defects are located. And these part of disc has very complicated geometry, therefore proper transducer selection, wedge design, fabrication, classification and evaluation of the signal identification are required. In this research, test block with the artificial flaws at keyway and boresurface parts have been used in order to establish the ultrasonic inspection technique for flaw detectability on disc. The analysis of the signals from the test blocks was performed. The wedges were designed according to the curvature from the discs. All the ultrasonic signals were collected and identified for evaluation. The ultrasonic inspection technique for the flaw-detection was established from this research. And it is proved that the result of this research can be applicable in the field inspection.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.227-239
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• 2020

Despite proven effectiveness and accuracy in laboratories, the existing damage assessment based on guided ultrasonic waves (GUWs) or acoustic emission (AE) confronts challenges when extended to real-world structural health monitoring (SHM) for railway tracks. Central to the concerns are the extremely complex signal appearance due to highly dispersive and multimodal wave features, restriction on transducer installations, and severe contaminations of ambient noise. It remains a critical yet unsolved problem along with recent attempts to implement SHM in bourgeoning high-speed railway (HSR). By leveraging authors' continued endeavours, an SHM framework, based on actively generated diffuse ultrasonic waves (DUWs) and a benchmark-free condition contrast algorithm, has been developed and deployed via an all-in-one SHM system. Miniaturized lead zirconate titanate (PZT) wafers are utilized to generate and acquire DUWs in long-range railway tracks. Fatigue cracks in the tracks show unique contact behaviours under different conditions of external loads and further disturb DUW propagation. By contrast DUW propagation traits, fatigue cracks in railway tracks can be characterised quantitatively and the holistic health status of the tracks can be evaluated in a real-time manner. Compared with GUW- or AE-based methods, the DUW-driven inspection philosophy exhibits immunity to ambient noise and measurement uncertainty, less dependence on baseline signals, use of significantly reduced number of transducers, and high robustness in atrocious engineering conditions. Conformance tests are performed on HSR tracks, in which the evolution of fatigue damage is monitored continuously and quantitatively, demonstrating effectiveness, adaptability, reliability and robustness of DUW-driven SHM towards HSR applications.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.130-137
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• 2000

Ultrasonic technique which is one of the most common and reliable nondestructive evaluation techniques has been applied to evaluate the integrity of structures by analyzing the characteristics of signal scattered from internal defects. Therefore, the numerical analysis of the ultrasonic scattered field is absolutely necessary for the accurate and quantitative estimation of internal defects. Various modeling techniques now play an important role in nondestructive evaluation and have been employed to solve elastic wave scattering problems. Because the elastodynamic boundary element method is useful to analyze the scattered field in infinite media. it has been used to calculate the ultrasonic wavefields scattered from internal defects. In this study, a review of the boundary element method used for elastic wave scattering problems is presented and, as examples of the boundary element method, the scattered fields due to a circular cavity subjected to incident SH-wave and due to a surface-breaking crack subjected to incident Rayleigh wave are illustrated.

• 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.17 no.1
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• pp.11-22
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• 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.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.41 no.6
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• pp.483-489
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• 2017

An ultrasonic technique was developed to characterize the resonance behavior of a microcantilever operating in a megahertz regime. A high-power ultrasonic pulser and a contact transducer were employed to excite the silicon microcantilever, and a Michelson interferometer was used to obtain the time domain waveform. The natural frequency of the microcantilever was evaluated through the fast Fourier transform of the signal, and a numerical analysis using the finite element method confirmed the measurement data. The present study proposes a novel and facile method to evaluate nanoscale materials and structures with high sensitivity compared to conventional approaches.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.7-13
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• 1993

Fracture behavior of pre-cracked compact tension specimens made of AISI 4130 steel was investigated using acoustic emission (AE) and ultrasonic C-scan measurements. While each specimen was loaded up to a certain level, various acoustic emission parameters were recorded together with the crack opening displacement (COD). An elastic-plastic finite element analysis was performed to calculate COD and the damage (plastic) zone size ahead of crack tip. Ultrasonic C-scans, in a pulse-echo, immersion mode, were done for mapping the damage zone size. The agreement between the finite element results and the measured COD was satisfactory. Based on AE results, the test specimens were found to show ductile behavior. The slope of the total ringdown counts vs. COD curve was useful to determine the crack initiation. The preliminary C-scan images showed evidence of changes in the amplitude of ultrasonic signal in the damaged region, and the shape and size of the damage zone matched qualitatively with the finite element results. A further work on the damage zone sizing was also pointed out.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.1569-1573
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• 2008

This paper describes a development of Ultrasonic NDE software to analyze steam generator of nuclear power plant. The developed software includes classical analysis method such as A, B, C and D-scan images. And it can analyze the detected internal cracks using 3D image processing method. To do such, we obtain raw data from specimens of real pipeline of power plants, and get the envelope signal using Empirical Mode Decomposition from obtained ultrasonic 1-dimensional data. The reconstructed 3D crack images offer useful information about the location, shape and size of cracks, even if there is no special 2D image analysis technique. The developed analysis software is applied to specimens containing various cracks with known dimensions. The results of application showed that the developed software provided accurate and enhanced 2D images and reconstructed 3D image of cracks.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.27 no.6
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• pp.531-540
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• 2007

While determination of the solid propellant burning rates by ultrasound, it has been reported that the frequent data scatters were caused by two major factors; 1) variation in the acoustical properties, and 2) non-linear burning of a solid propellant sample under investigation. This work is carried out for the purpose of investigating the effect of non-linear burning of solid propellant samples. Specifically, we propose an ultrasonic measurement model that can predict the reflections from solid propellant surfaces with non-linear burning by the combination of two ingredients; 1) a pulse-echo ultrasonic measurement model for a planar, circular reflector imbedded in the second medium in an immersion set-up, and 2) an efficient model of non-linear burning surfaces with a number of small, planar circles. Then, we demonstrate the capability of the proposed measurement model by simulation of the surface echo signals from four different burning surfaces that have been generated by the combination of two factors; the base shape (flat or paraboloidal) and the surface roughness (perfectly smooth or randomly rough). From the simulation presented here, we can confirm the fact that the non-linear burning of the propellant can cause the waveform change of the burning surface echo and the corresponding spectrum variation.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.515-522
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• 2021

In this paper, we present and analyze a method of applying a machine learning to ultrasonic test signals for constant monitoring of the welding faults in a tubular steel tower. For the machine learning, feature selection based on genetic algorithm and fault signal classification using a support vector machine have been used. In the feature selection, the peak value, histogram lower bound, and normal negative log-likelihood from 30 features are selected. Those features clearly indicate the difference of signals according to the depth of faults. In addition, as a result of applying the selected features to the support vector machine, it has been possible to perfectly distinguish between the regions with and without faults. Hence, it is expected that the results of this study will be useful in the development of an early detection system for fault growth based on ultrasonic signals and in the energy transmission related industries in the future.