Digital radiography in the inspection of welded pipes to be installed under deep water offshore gas and oil pipelines, like a presalt in Brazil, in the paper has been investigated. The aim is to use digital radiography for nondestructive testing of welds as it is already in use in the medical, aerospace, security, automotive, and petrochemical sectors. Among the current options, the DDA (Digital Detector Array) is considered as one of the best solutions to replace industrial films, as well as to increase the sensitivity to reduce the inspection cycle time. This paper shows the results of this new technique, comparing it to radiography with industrial films systems. In this paper, 20 test specimens of longitudinal welded pipe joints, specially prepared with artificial defects like cracks, lack of fusion, lack of penetration, and porosities and slag inclusions with varying dimensions and in 06 different base metal wall thicknesses, were tested and a comparison of the techniques was made. These experiments verified the purposed rules for parameter definitions and selections to control the required digital radiographic image quality as described in the draft international standard ISO/DIS 10893-7. This draft is first standard establishing the parameters for digital radiography on weld seam of welded steel pipes for pressure purposes to be used on gas and oil pipelines.
The aim of this work is to evaluate the feasibility of the direct radiography on weld
inspection in oil pipelines and gas pipeline during the manufacturing process. To that, 6 specimens
with 6 different thickness and varied height of reinforced weld with 5 different kinds of defects
were made. All samples were radiographied using Class I films and flat panel. For all specimens the
inspection length was 8''. Thus, with the flat panel the detector-to-object distance varied so that it
may adequate to several diameters of the tubes.
The detector-to-object distance was calculated based on the physical size of the detector
taking into consideration a safe distance between the tube curvature and the flat panel extremities,
keeping the lowest possible magnification factor so that it could be obtained the length of the
inspection. Images with 6 integration time for each experimental arrangement were obtained.
The images obtained with the Flat Panel/YXLON system were analyzed according to their
quality by using the Contrast parameters (essential wire) (DNV 2007/ IS0 12096 with
reinforcement and ISO 10893-7 basis material), Basic Spatial Resolution BSR (ISO 10893-7)
and normalized signal-to-noise ratio - SNRN (ISO 10893-7) and by detectability using as reference
the conventional radiography.
The results showed that for all thickness, the exposure time used to meet the image quality
requirements were below with direct radiography. However the BSR were not reached for thickness
of 4.85, 6.40 and 9.67 mm, therefore the compensation principle established by ISO 10893-7 was
considered, that is, one more contrast wire for a less wire pair.
The digital technique proved to be more sensitive to real defects found on welds than the
conventional technique. Then it can be conclude that the digital radiography utilizing the flat panel
can be applicable to the oil and gas segment with advantages over conventional technique as to
quality aspects, productivity, environment, safety and health.