• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.42 no.5
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• pp.546-551
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• 2010

The objective of this research is to estimate the crack location and size of a carbon steel pipe by using a laser ultrasound guided wave for the wall thinning evaluation of an elbow. The wall thinning of the carbon steel pipe is one of the most serious problems in nuclear power plants, especially the wall thinning of the carbon steel elbow caused by Flow-Accelerated Corrosion (FAC). Therefore, a non-destructive inspection method of elbow is essential for the nuclear power plants to operate safely. The specimens used in this study were carbon steel elbows, which represented the main elements of real nuclear power plants. The shape of the wall thinning was an oval with a width of 120mm, a length of 80mm, and a depth of 5mm. The L(0,1) and L(0,2) modes variation of the ultrasound guided wave signal is obtained from the response of the laser generation/air-coupled detection ultrasonic hybrid system represent the characteristics of the defect. The trends of these characteristics and signal processing were used to estimate the size and location of wall thinning.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.597-602
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• 2004

In practical applications of guided wave techniques, it is very important but also difficult to identify the propagating modes, and it is preferred to generate and detect a single or less dispersive mode. Also the noncontact method is required in the automated field application. So this paper considers a non-contact guided wave technique with enhanced mode-selectivity, where a laser beam illuminated through arrayed line slits is used as the transmitter and the air-coupled transducer is used as the receiver. The line arrayed laser illumination is a wavelength matching technique that ran generate only a few modes. The air-coupled transducer detects the leaky wave of the propagated guided wave, and by tuning its detection angle we ran detect the selected single mode. Experimental results for a 1mm thick aluminum plate proved the usefulness of the proposed method, and especially it was shown that this method was powerful in the generation and detection of the $a_0$ mode.

• Corrosion Science and Technology
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.108-113
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• 2005

One of the recent safety issues in the pressurized heavy water reactor (PHWR) is the cracking of the feeder pipe. Because of the limited accessibility to the cracked region and a high dose of radiation exposure, it is difficult to inspect all the pipes with the conventional ultrasonic method. In order to solve this problem, a long-range guided wave technique has been developed. A computer program to calculate the dispersion curves in the pipe was developed and the dispersion curves for the feeder pipes in PHWR plants were determined. Several longitudinal and/or flexural modes were selected from the review of the dispersion curves and an actual experiment has been carried out with the specific alignment of the piezoelectric ultrasonic transducers. They were confirmed as L(0,1)) and/or flexural modes(F(m,2)) by the short time Fourier transformation(STFT) and were sensitive to the circumferential cracks, but not to the axial cracks in the pipe. An electromagnetic acoustic transducers(EMAT) was designed and fabricated for the generation and reception of the torsional guided wave. The axial cracks were detected by a torsional mode(T(0,1)) generated by the EMAT.

• Proceedings of the KWS Conference
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• 2005.06a
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• pp.194-196
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• 2005

Ultrasonic guided waves are gaining increasing attention for the inspection of platelike and rodlike structures. At the same time, inspection methods that do not require contact with the test piece are being developed for advanced applications. This paper capitalizes on recent advances in the areas of guided wave ultrasonics and noncontact ultrasonics to demonstrate a superior method for the nondestructive detection of thinning defects simulating hidden corrosion in thin aluminum plates. The proposed approach uses EMAT(electro-magnetic acoustic transducer) for the noncontact generation and detection of guided plate waves. Interesting features in the dispersive behavior of selected guided modes are used for the detection of plate thinning. It is shown that mode cutoff measurements provide a qualitative detection of thinning defects. Measurement of the mode group velocity can be also used to quantify of thinning depth.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.27 no.6
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• pp.582-590
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• 2007

Imperfectly jointed interface serves as mechanical waveguide for elastic waves and gives rise to two distinct kinds of guided wave propagating along the interface. Contact acoustic nonlinearity (CAN) is known to plays major role in the generation of these interface waves called generalized Rayleigh waves in non-welded interface. Closed crack is modeled as non-welded interface that has nonlinear discontinuity condition in displacement across its boundary. Mathematical analysis of boundary conditions and wave equation is conducted to investigate the dispersive characteristics of the interface waves. Existence of the generalized Rayleigh wave(interface wave) in nonlinear contact interface is verified in theory where the dispersion equation for the interface wave is formulated and analyzed. It reveals that the interface waves have two distinct modes and that the phase velocity of anti-symmetric wave mode is highly dependent on contact conditions represented by linear and nonlinear dimensionless specific stiffness.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2003.04a
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• pp.851-856
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• 2003

This paper proposes a single-mode Lamb-wave generation and detection system using a pulsed laser as a generator and an air-coupled transducer combined with the wavelet transform analysis, as the detector. The laser source with arrayed linear slits was used to generate Lamb-wave which is able to control the wavelength of Lamb-wave to be generated by changing the slits separation. An ari-coupled transducer was used to receive Lamb-wave, which can selectably receive a single mode of leaky Lamb wave by changing the oblique angle of transducer, since the leaky Lamb-wave has unique leaky-angle according to the mode. Also, the received signal was processed by wavelet transform for the analysis in domain of time-frequency. The theoretical dipersion curve and the experimetal result was compared to show good agreement.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.544-548
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• 2003

The objective of this investigation is to develop an efficient method to generate and measure torsional waves in non-ferromagnetic waveguides by using magnetostrictive transducers. In existing methods using a nickel strip that is attached circumferentially to the test specimen such as aluminum pipes, large current input to the magnetostrictive transducer often generates undesired wave modes in addition to desired torsional wave. However, we propose an improved method to generate the torsional waves without being accompanied by other undesirable wave modes regardless of the input current magnitude. The specific transducer configuration and its performance will be presented in the present investigation.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.144-149
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• 2004

The objective of this investigation is to develop an efficient method to generate and measure torsional waves in non-ferromagnetic waveguides by using magnetostrictive transducers. In existing methods using a nickel strip that is attached circumferentially to the test specimen, large current input to the magnetostrictive transducer often generates undesired wave modes in addition to the desired torsional wave. However, we propose a new method to generate the torsional waves without being accompanied with other undesirable wane modes regardless of the input current magnitude. The specific transducer configuration is suggested and its performance is also checked through a series of experiments.

• Proceedings of the KWS Conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.307-309
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• 2006

For efficient NDE of pipes, essential components of power plant facilities, ultrasonic guided waves were generated and received applying an air-coupled transducer and comb one as non-contact technology, Mode generation and selection were predicted based on theoretical dispersive curve and the element spaceof a comb transducer. In addition, a receiving angle of the air-coupled transducer was determined to acquire the predicted modes by theoretical phase velocity of each mode. Theoretical dispersive curve was compared with the results of the time-frequency spectroscopes based on the wavelet transform and 2D-FFT to identify the characteristics of the received mode. The received modes show a good agreement with the predicted ones.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.221-232
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• 2008

Rock bolts have been installed into rockmass as a main support system. In order to evaluate the rock bolt integrity using non-destructive technique, the transmission method of the guided ultrasonic wave has been successfully performed. For the transmission method, however, the source for the generation o# guided ultrasonic waves should be installed at the end of the steel bar during construction of the rock bolt in the field. The purpose of this study is to suggest a reflection method that the source and the receiver are installed on the head of the steel bar. The reflection method is compared with the transmission method using non-embedded rock bolts and rock bolts embedded in concrete block. In this experiment, the piezo disc element is used as the source and the AE sensor is used as the receiver. The wavelet transform is applied to determine the energy velocity. The experimental studies show that the reflection method produces almost identical value of the transmission method, and the energy velocity increases with the defect ratio. This study suggests that the reflection method of the guided ultrasonic wave may be a suitable method fur the rock bolt integrity evaluation in the field.