• Journal of the Korean Society of Propulsion Engineers
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.61-68
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• 2006

To measure burning rate of solid propellants using ultrasound, a special closed bomb and an ultrasonic and pressure measurement system are fabricated. During pressurization tests and homing tests on propellants, ultrasonic and pressure signal are acquired in real time fashion by this system. Based on acquired signals, analysis programs using two different algorithm which can measure burning rates corresponding to pressures are compared. One algorithm is to correct sound velocity variation of propellants and solid couplant, another one is only to correct sound velocity variation of propellants. And accuracies of homing rates measured through these algorithms are calculated through comparison with the burning rates measured using strand burner method.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.47-52
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• 2011

An electromagnetic acoustic transducer(EMAT) is a non-contact transducer which can transmit the ultrasonic guided waves into specimens without couplant. And it can easily generate specific guided waves such as SH(shear horizontal) or Lamb waves by altering the design of coil and magnet. In this study, the SH wave, which is generated by EMAT, has been applied to estimate the thickness-reduction in a steel plate. Especially, the interesting feature of the dispersive behavior in selected wave modes is used to detect the thickness-reduction. Experimental results show that the reduction-level can be quantified by the measurement of the group velocity of the wave which passes though the thinning area.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.268-274
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• 2004

Patch type piezo-polymer sensors for smart structures were experimented to detect elastic wave. The pencil lead braking test was performed to analyze the characteristics of patch-type piezo-polymer sensors such as polyvinyliden fluoride (PVDF) and polyvinylidene fluoride trifluorethylene (P(VDF-TrFE)) for several test specimens with various elastic wave velocities and acoustical impedances. The characteristics of the patch-type piezo-polymer sensor were compared with the commercial PZT acoustic emission (AE) sensor. The vacuum grease and epoxy resin were used as a couplant for the acoustic impedance matching between the sensor and specimen. The peak amplitude of elastic wave increased as the diameter of piezo-film and acoustical impedance of the specimen increased. The frequency detection range of the piezo-film sensors decreased with increasing diameter of the piezo-film sensor. The P(VDF-TrFE) sensor was more sensitive than the PVDF sensor.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.36 no.12
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• pp.1511-1519
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• 2012

Pipe structures contain many welded zones, and ultrasonic tests are increasingly being performed by using automated testing devices in order to evaluate the weld integrity. An electromagnetic acoustic transducer (EMAT) is a noncontact transducer that can transmit or receive ultrasonic waves without a couplant. Furthermore, it can easily generate specific guided waves such as SH (shear horizontal) or Lamb waves by altering the design of the coil and magnet. Therefore, an EMAT should be useful for application to an automated ultrasonic inspection system. In this study, SH waves generated using an EMAT were applied to inspect the pipe-weld zone. To analyze the specific SH mode (SH0) from the SH wave signals, wavelet transform was applied. It was found that flaws could be detected precisely because the intensity of the $SH_0$ mode-frequency, which is analyzed by using wavelet transform, is proportional to the length of the flaw.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Automotive Engineers
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.83-92
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• 2005

An electromagnetic acoustic transducer (EMAT) is a unique probe that does not require a couplant or gel and also can usually generate or detect an ultrasonic wave into specimens across a small gap. It, therefore can be applied in a noncontact mode with a high degree of reproducibility. Especially stiffness of composites depends on layup sequence of CFRP(carbon fiber reinforced plastics) laminates. It is very important to evaluate the layup errors in prepreg laminates. A nondestructive technique can therefore serve as a useful measurement for detecting layup errors. This shear wave for detecting the presence of the errors is very sensitive. A decomposition model has been used in the interpretation and prediction of test results. Test results have been com pared with model data. It is found that the high probability shows between tests and the model utilized in characterizing cured layups of the laminates. Also a C-scan method was used for detecting layup of the laminates because of extracting fiber orientation information from the ultrasonic reflection caused by structural imperfections in the laminates. Therefore, it was found that interface C-scan images show the fiber orientation information by using two-dimensional fast Fourier transform (2-D FFT).

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.37-42
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• 2005

The non-destructive Inspection of the fillet weldment has difficulties due to its geometrical complexity and uneasy access. The surface shear horizontal wave (SH-wave), however, has been successfully applied to the detection of cracks on the surface and sub-surface of the filet weldment heel part. The conventional ultrasonic inspection using the surface SH-wave is usually a contact method using piezoelectric transducer. Thus, it is not suitable for a field application because the reliability and repeatability of inspection are significantly affected by test conditions such as couplant, contact pressure and pre-process. In order to overcome this problem, a non-contact SH-wave inspection method using EMAT is propose. The experimental results with this non-contact method are compared with those with a conventional ultrasonic method in fillet weldment with slit type defects. It is shown that the non-contact inspection technique requires simple procedure and less time in the fillet weldment inspection.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.427-435
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• 2009

Cylindrical structures such as pipes and shafts are widely used in various industrial facilities. Recently, researches on magnetostrictive transduction of torsional waves have been actively reported for the nondestructive evaluation of those cylindrical structures. However, the existing magnetostrictive patch transducer has somewhat inconvenient and time.consuming process like patch bonding to a structure since it should employ a magnetostrictive patch having strong magnetostriction. To overcome these limitations of the existing transducer, in this work, we develop a novel modular magnetostrictive transducer to generate and measure torsional waves to inspect a cylindrical structure. The proposed transducer can be applied as viscous liquid coupling with shear couplant or dry coupling without coupling media instead of patch bonding to a structure. We describe a detailed structure of the modular transducer and conduct some experiments to verify its performance.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.122-129
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• 2009

Recently much attention has been paid to a guided wave due to its effective applicability to long range and fast inspection of structures. In guided wave based NDE, the appropriate selection of wave modes is one of important factors since the test performance is highly dependent on which mode of guided waves is employed. As far as plate-like structures are concerned, so far, SH guided wave has not been frequently applied compared to Lamb waves, which is mostly caused by the lack of proper and convenient transducers to generate and measure the SH waves. In this investigation, a new small-sized SH guided wave transducer based on magnetostriction is proposed. The present transducer was designed to be modular and be used with shear couplant to avoid the inconvenience of the existing magnetostrictive patch transducers, which comprises the ferromagnetic patch tightly bonded to a structure. The wave transduction mechanism and the detailed configuration of the present transducer are presented. Experimental verification is also conducted on test specimens and the results confirm the good performance of the present transducer module.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.95-102
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• 2005

There are many tube and pipeline in nuclear power plant under high temperature and high pressure. Erosion and corrosion defects were expected on these tube and pipe-line by environmental and mechanical factors. These erosion and corrosion defects ran be evaluated by ultrasonic technique. In these study, Scanning Laser Source(SLS) technique was applied to detect defect and construct image. This technique also makes detection possible on rough and curved surfaces such as tube and pipe-line by scanning. Conventional ultrasonic scanning technique requires immersion of specimen or water jet for transferring ultrasonic wave between transducer and specimen. However, this SLS technique does not need contacting and couplant to generate surface wave and to get flaw images. Therefore, this SLS technique has several advantages, for complicated production inspection, non-contact, remote from specimen, and high resolution. In this study, SLS images were obtained with various conditions of generation laser ultrasound and receiving in order to enhance detectability of flaws on the tube. Stress corrosion cracks were produced on tube and images of stress corrosion cracks were constructed by using SLS technique.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.15-21
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• 2004

It is possible to detect flaws in pipelines without interruption using all EMAT transducer because it is a non-contact transducer which can transmit ultrasonic waves into specimens without couplant. And it ran easily generate guided waves desired in each specific problem by altering the design of coil and magnet. In the present work, EMAT systems have been fabricated to generate surface waves, and selectively the plate wave of $A_1\;or\;S_1$ mode. The surface wave of 1.5MHz showed a good signal-to-noise ratio without distortion in its propagation along a pipeline, while the $S_1$ mode of 800kHz and the $A_1$ mode of 940kHz were distorted according to their dispersive properties. The wider the excitation pulse becomes, the better the mode selectivity of the plate waves becomes. A pipe of 256mm inner diameter and 5.5m thickness with 5 flaws was used for comparing the flaw detectability among the modes under consideration.