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Organisationseinheit der BAM
- 8 Zerstörungsfreie Prüfung (3)
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- 2 Prozess- und Anlagensicherheit (2)
- 2.1 Sicherheit von Energieträgern (2)
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- 3.2 Gefahrguttanks und Unfallmechanik (1)
- 8.1 Sensorik, mess- und prüftechnische Verfahren (1)
- 9 Komponentensicherheit (1)
- 9.6 Additive Fertigung metallischer Komponenten (1)
Austenitic stainless steel welds as well as dissimilar metal welds with nickel alloy filler material, used in safety relevant parts of nuclear power plants, still challenge the ultrasonic inspection. The weld material forms large oriented grains which lead on the one hand to high sound scattering and on the other hand – to inhomogeneity and to the acoustic anisotropy of the weld structure. The ultrasonic wave fronts propagate not linearly, as in ferritic weld joints, but along the curves, which depend on the specific grain structure of the weld. Due the influence of these phenomena, it is difficult to analyze the inspection results and to classify the ultrasonic indications, which could be both from the weld geometry and from the material defects. A correct flaw sizing is not possible.
In an ongoing research project, different techniques to improve the reliability of ultrasonic testing at these kinds of welds are investigated. In a first step (in the previous research project) two ultrasonic inspection techniques were developed and validated on plane test specimens with artificial and realistic flaws. In the ongoing project, these techniques are applied to circumferential pipe welds with longitudinal and transverse flaws.
The technique developed at the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM) in Germany uses a combination of ray tracing and synthetic aperture focusing technique (SAFT). To investigate the unknown grain structure, the velocity distribution of weld-transmitting ultrasound waves is measured and used to model the weld by ray tracing.
The second technique, developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Nondestructive Testing (IZFP) in Germany, uses Sampling Phased Array (Full Matrix Capture) combined with the reverse phase matching (RPM) and the gradient elastic constant descent algorithm (GECDM). This inspection method is able to estimate the elastic constants of the columnar grains in the weld and offers an improvement of the reliability of ultrasonic testing through the correction of the sound field distortion. The unknown inhomogeneity and anisotropy are investigated using a reference indication and the special optimization algorithm.
Both reconstruction techniques give quantitative inspection results and allow the defect sizing. They have been compared to conventional ultrasonic testing with techniques, which are state of the art for components in nuclear power plants. The improvement will be quantified by the comparison of the probability of detection (POD) of each technique.
Pipe integrity is a central concern regarding technical safety, availability, and environmental compliance of industrial plants and pipelines. A condition monitoring system that detects and localizes threats in pipes prior to occurrence of actual structural failure, e.g., leakages, especially needs to target transient events such as impacts on the pipe wall or pressure waves travelling through the medium. In the present work, it is shown that fiber-optic distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) in conjunction with a suitable application geometry of the optical fiber sensor allows to track propagating acoustic waves in the pipeline wall on a fast time-scale. Therefore, short impacts on the pipe may be localized with high fidelity. Moreover, different acoustic modes are identified, and their respective group velocities are in good agreement with theoretical predications. In another set of experiments modeling realistic damage scenarios, we demonstrate that pressure waves following explosions of different gas mixtures in pipes can be observed. Velocities are verified by local piezoelectric pressure transducers. Due to the fully distributed nature of the fiber-optic sensing system, it is possible to record accelerated motions in detail. Therefore, in addition to detection and localization of threatening events for infrastructure monitoring, DAS may provide a powerful tool to study the development of gas explosions in pipes, e.g., investigation of deflagration-to-detonation-transitions (DDT).
The feasibility study „AGIFAMOR. Ageing infrastructures – distributed acoustic monitoring of pipes” is an interdisciplinary research project at BAM internally financed from 2015 to 2018. Therefore, the quite young fibre optic sensing technology of distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) was investigated to possibly be extended towards a global condition monitoring system for pipelines operating in real time.
DAS is a highly dynamic fibre optic sensing technology based on the method of coherent optical time domain reflectometry (C-OTDR). DAS allows capturing strain changes in the range of kHz. For the experimental work, the most suitable application yielding an optimum sensitivity was proven by wrapping a standard single-mode silica fibre around the pipe.
The DAS sensitivity was investigated regarding the detection of 1) incidents that initiate propagation of acoustic waves in the pipe wall, 2) changes inside the pipeline causing altered flow and 3) damage development in the pipe wall. Therefore, several testing setups in laboratory as well as in real scale were realized. For comparison purposes, experiments were accompanied by acoustic emission analyses and by measurements with accelerometers.
DAS was found to be very sensitive to gas ignition and its propagation across the pipe. Furthermore, the ability of DAS to detect and localize acoustic signals associated with pipeline leakage was demonstrated. The detection of crack formation and propagation within the pipe wall by means of DAS was studied during bending tests on several pipe segments, but was not proven so far with certainty. As expected, these studies turned out as the most difficult challenge due to the random occurrence and transient nature of microscopic damage phenomena.