• Journal of Energy Engineering
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.103-109
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• 2016

Polyethylene pipes has useful benefits which are anti-corrosive and flexible material, so it is used to gas pipes but also class 3 water pipes of nuclear power plant, process pipes of petrochemical plant and chemical plant. So the usage of polyethylene pipes is widely increased. But it has been limited for the usage of polyethylene, because it can not be directly detected to fusion joints by using non destructive evaluation. Polyethylene pipes are connected by two methods, one is butt fusion and the other is electrofusion. Butt fusion is widely used to connecting the pipes. It is proposed to method for determining the reliability of joints in this study that is detection of the melt flow zone at fusion joints. In this study, middle density polyethylene is used, outside diameter of the test specimen is 225mm and thickness is 20.5mm. Speed of ultrasonic of this test specimen is 2,200m/s. Test specimens were fabricated by varying the heating time which means from 0% to 130% applying time through heating plate to polyethylene for detecting melt flow zone. Also 4 additional test specimens were made, one was made that not scrapping attached surface of pipes but applying 100% of the proper heating time and the others were made to include of soil, gravel and vinly tape paper at fusion joints, that were also applied 100% of proper heating time. Ultrasonic testing to measure the melt flow zone of 20 test specimens was conducted by using 3.5MHz and 5.0MHz ultrasonic probes and melt flow zone measuring was conducted to three times at different point to one specimen. To differentiate the melt flow zone signal, post image processing was equally conducted to all test results and image levels, contrast, sharpen, threshold were adopted to all teat results and the test results were displayed gray scale. From the results, for the shorter heating times the reflection area of multiple echo have been increased, so the data was obtained from the position where it can be eliminated as much as possible. At 80% of proper heating time(168 sec.), the signal of melt flow zone was obtained clearly, so measuring could be conducted. From 7% of proper heating time(15 sec.) to shorter heating times. we could not obtain the signal because test specimen was not fused. From the result, we can verify that measuring of melt flow zone by using phased array ultrasonic imaging method is possible. And we can verify to complete and incomplete butt fusion by measuring the melt flow zone.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.351-364
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• 2002

Conventional 3D ultrasound imaging using mechanical ID arrays suffers from poor elevation resolution due to the limited depth-of-focus (DOF). On the other hand, 3D imaging systems using 2D phased arrays have a large number of active channels and hence require a very expensive and bulky beamforming hardware. To overcome these limitations, a new real-time volumetric imaging method using curved 2-D arrays is presented, in which a small subaperture, consisting of 256 elements, moves across the array surface to scan a volume of interest. For this purpose, a 2-D curved array is designed which consists of 90$\times$46 elements with 1.5λ inter-element spacing and has the same view angles along both the lateral and elevation directions as those of a commercial mechanical 1-D array. In the proposed method, transmit and receive subapertures are constructed by cutting the four corners of a rectangular aperture to obtain a required image qualify with a small number of active channels. In addition the receive subaperture size is increased by using a sparse array scheme that uses every other elements in both directions. To suppress the grating lobes elevated due to the increase in clement spacing, fold-over array scheme is adopted in transmit, which doubles the effective size of a transmit aperture in each direction. Computer simulation results show that the proposed method can provide almost the same and greatly improved resolutions in the lateral and elevation directions, respectively compared with the conventional 3D imaging with a mechanical 1-D array.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.36 no.5
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• pp.345-352
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• 2016

As aircrafts are being operated at high altitude, wing structures experience various fatigue loadings under cryogenic environments. As a result, fatigue damage such as a crack could be develop that could eventually lead to a catastrophic failure. For this reason, fatigue damage monitoring is an important process to ensure efficient maintenance and safety of structures. To implement damage detection in real-world flight environments, a special cooling chamber was built. Inside the chamber, the temperature was maintained at the cryogenic temperature, and harmonic fatigue loading was given to a wing structure. In this study, piezoelectric active-sensing based guided waves were used to detect the fatigue damage. In particular, a beamforming technique was applied to efficiently measure the scattering wave caused by the fatigue damage. The system was used for detection, growth monitoring, and localization of a fatigue crack. In addition, a sensor diagnostic process was also applied to ensure the proper operation of piezoelectric sensors. Several experiments were implemented and the results of the experiments demonstrated that this process could efficiently detect damage in such an extreme environment.

• Korean Journal of Optics and Photonics
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.1-6
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• 2020

The chest wall, an organ directly affected by environmental particles through respiration, consists of ribs, a pleural layer and intercostal muscles. To diagnose early and treat disease in this body part, it is important to visualize the details of the chest wall, but the structure of the pleural layer cannot be seen by chest computed tomography or ultrasound. On the other hand, optical coherence tomography (OCT), with a high spatial resolution, is suited to observe pleural-layer response to talc, one of the fine materials. However, intensity-based OCT is weak in providing information to distinguish the detailed structure of the chest wall, and cannot distinguish the reaction of the pleural layer from the change in the muscle by the talc. Polarization-sensitive OCT (PS-OCT) takes advantage of the fact that specific tissues like muscle, which have optical birefringence, change the backscattered light's polarization state. Moreover, the birefringence of muscle associated with the arrangement of myofilaments indicates the muscle's condition, by measuring retardation change. The PS-OCT image is interpreted from three major perspectives for talc-exposure chest-wall imaging: a thickened pleural layer, a separation between pleural layer and muscle, and a phase-retardation measurement around lesions. In this paper, a rabbit chest wall after talc pleurodesis is investigated by PS-OCT. The PS-OCT images visualize the pleural layer and muscle, respectively, and this system shows different birefringence of normal and damaged lesions. Also, an analyisis based on phase-retardation slope supports results from the PS-OCT image and histology.