Nondestructive Evaluation of the Defects in Composite-sintered Bushes Using Ultrasonics

Advanced composite-sintered bushings are widely utilized in the areas of excavators and injection molding machines as a journal bearing. Since the bearings are mainly used under high loads, service life should be long and the stored oil of inner bushings has to be continually fed into the bearing. The composite-sintered bushings are consisted of the two different materials; outer steel materials and inner porous sintered materials respectively. High temperature diffusion bonding has been applied for holding the both materials of the bushing together. Therefore, it is very important that the bonding reliability has to be assured and evaluated in manufacturing process. Finite element method (FEM) is performed in order to evaluate the minimum allowable flaw sizes that are possibly generated in the composite-sintered bushings. Additionally, the composite-sintered bushings were undergone ultrasonic C-scan tests to find out the size of inherent flaws through artificially simulated UT signal analysis.