SAFT Based Imaging and Centroid Technique for Classification of UT Signals from the Steam Generator of a Nuclear Power Plant

Many technical methods are used for nondestructive testing field for solid materials. Among those, ultrasonic inspection methods are widely used and one of the popular methods involves the extraction of an appropriate set of features followed by the use of a neural network for the classification of the signals in the feature space. This paper describes an approach which uses LMS method to determine the coordinates of the ultrasonic probe followed by the use of SAFT with centroid technique to estimate the location of the ultrasonic reflector. The method is employed for classifying UT-NDE signals from the steam generator tubes in a nuclear power plant. The classification results are presented for the ultrasonic signals from cracks and deposits within steam generator tubes.