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- Ray tracing (2)
- Austenitic welds (1)
- Crystal microstructure (1)
- Guided waves (1)
- Numerical simulations (1)
- SAFT (1)
- Transverse cracks (1)
- Ultrasonic materials testing (1)
- Ultrasonic propagation (1)
- Ultrasonic reflection (1)
The synthetic aperture focusing technique (SAFT) is an imaging technique commonly used in ultrasonic inspection. In order to apply SAFT to the inspection of austenitic welds, the inhomogeneous anisotropic nature of the weld structure has to be taken into account. A suitable approach to accomplish this, is to couple the SAFT-algorithm with a ray tracing program (RT-SAFT). While SAFT-imaging of cracks in austenitic welds by use of ray tracing has been carried out before, all attempts so far were limited to longitudinal cracks which usually allows a treatment as 2-dimensional problem. In case of transverse cracks, a full 3-dimensional ray tracing is necessary in order to perform a SAFT-reconstruction. In this paper, we give an outline of our attempts to reconstruct images of transverse cracks in austenitic welds, utilizing 3-dimensional ray tracing and a layered structure model derived from an empirical model of grain orientations in welds. We present results of this RT-SAFT on experimental data taken from transverse cracks in different austenitic welds, which show that size and position of the cracks can be estimated with good accuracy, and compare them to images obtained by assuming an isotropic homogeneous medium which corresponds to the application of the classical SAFT-algorithm.
Guided waves are increasingly a subject of great interest in nondestructive testing. An example of research in this field is the development of a novel procedure for ultrasonic testing of wheelset-axles using guided waves, which requires to treat the wheelset-axle as a thick walled cylinder with varying thickness. In order to describe ultrasound propagation in a waveguide with non-constant thickness, a multimodal approach, which allows to avoid extensive mesh-based numerical calculations, seems to be promising. The method treats the modes of a corresponding waveguide with constant thickness as a base in which an arbitrary sound field can be expressed. Since the local sound field at any given position in the waveguide with varying thickness will be a combination of these base modes, the problem is reduced to solving the differential equation that governs the evolution of the coefficients in the mode spectrum along the waveguide. Once the description of the sound field along the waveguide is obtained, the time dependence is added by multiplication with a simple oscillating term. Simulations of pulse propagation through the waveguide can then be constructed by adding up a sufficient number of mono-frequent continuous wave solutions. As an early stage in developing a simulation tool for sound propagation in thick walled cylinders with varying thickness, the multimodal approach was implemented and tested for the simple case of plate geometries. In this work, an overview of the simulations carried out for plates with non-constant thickness is presented. The performance of the algorithm based on the multimodal approach and the obtained results are compared to those of mesh-based simulation tools.
Ultrasonic examination of anisotropic inhomogeneous austenitic welds is challenging, because of the columnar grain structure of the weld leads to beam skewing and splitting. Modeling tools play an important role in understanding the ultrasound field propagation and optimization of experimental parameters during the ultrasonic testing of austenitic welds as well as the interpretation of the test results. In this contribution, an efficient theoretical model based on the ray tracing concepts is developed to calculate the ultrasonic fields in inhomogeneous austenitic welds quantitatively. The developed model determines the ultrasound fields by taking into account the directivity of the ray source, the inhomogenity of the weld as well as ray transmission coefficients. Directivity of the ray source in columnar grained austenitic materials (including layback orientation) is obtained in three dimensions based on Lamb's reciprocity theorem. Ray energy reflection and transmission coefficients at an interface between two general columnar grained austenitic materials are calculated in three dimensions. The ray tracing model predictions on inhomogeneous austenitic weld material are compared against those from CIVA, a commercial non-destructive modeling and simulation tool. The ultrasonic modeling tools in CIVA are based on semi-analytical solutions. For beam propagation simulation, a so-called 'pencil method' is used, which involves modeling the probe as a set of individual source points, each radiating 'a bundle' of diverging rays into the medium and integrating those elementary contributions. Inhomogenity in the weld region is approximated by mapping the grain orientations on weld macrograph. Simulation results for ultrasonic field profiles for an austenitic weld are shown to be in good agreement with the corresponding experimental results.