• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Machine Tool Engineers Conference
• /
• 2005.05a
• /
• pp.216-227
• /
• 2005

The head penetrations for control rod drive mechanism and instrumentation systems are installed at the reactor pressure vessel head of PWRs. Primary coolant water and the operating conditions of PWR plants can cause cracking of these nickel-based alloy through a process called primary water stress corrosion cracking (PWSCC). Inspection of the head penetrations to ensure the integrity of the head penetrations has been interested since reactor coolant leakages were found at U. S. reactors in 2000 and 2001. The complex geometry of the head penetrations and the very low echo amplitude from the fine, multiple flaws due to the nature of the see made it difficult to detect and size the flaws using conventional pulse-echo UT methods. Time-of-flight-diffraction technique, which utilizes the time difference between the flaw tips while pulse-echo does the flaw response amplitude from the flaw, has been selected for this inspection for it's best performance of the detection and sizing of the head penetration see flaws. This study defines the limits of the detectable and accurately sizable minimum flaw size which can be detected by the General TOFD and the Delta TOFD techniques for circumferentially and axially oriented flaws respectively. These results assures the reliability of the inspection techniques to detect and accurately size for various kind of flaws, and will also be utilized for the future development and qualifications of the TOFD techniques to enhance the detecting sensitivity and sizing accuracy of the flaws of the reactor head penetrations in nuclear power plants.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
• /
• 2008.05a
• /
• pp.556-559
• /
• 2008

In this study, an automated ultrasonic testing system and post signal and image processing techniques are developed in order to construct ultrasonic flaw images in weldments. The automated ultrasonic testing system developed in the present study adopted an 8 channel pulser/receiver-ADC unit and a 2 axis motion driving unit and the post signal and image processing algorithms are built into the system program of the automated ultrasonic testing system.

• Proceedings of the Korea Committee for Ocean Resources and Engineering Conference
• /
• 2004.05a
• /
• pp.274-278
• /
• 2004

A simultaneous measurement system that can analyze the flaw-structure interactions has been developed This system consists of four CCD cameras, two for capturing instantaneous flaw fields and two for tracking a solid body. The three-dimensional vector fields around a cylinder are measured while the motion of the cylinder forced by the flow field is measured simultaneously with the constructed system The cylinder is pended in the working fluid of a water channel and the surface of the working fluid is forced sinusoidal to make the cylinder bounced Reynolds number for the mean main stream is about l000. The interaction between the flaw fields and the cylinder motion is examined quantitatively.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.11 no.6
• /
• pp.1729-1734
• /
• 2016

The surface inspection of a steel billet is a common practice in the steel manufacturing process prior to hot rolling to produce steel wire for tire cord. This billet surface inspection is an important process because flaws on the surface may cause major failures during the product manufacturing phase. This paper presents a computer simulation based on a finite element method for a magnetic flaw detector with a function of the current intensity, the number of coil turns, and the billet proceeding speed during the production phase based on the typical condition of conventional apparatus. Based on the simulation result, the magnitude of the electromagnetic field on the surface diminished with distance from the electromagnet. In addition, the increased current intensity and the increased number of coil turns actually induced a stronger electromagnetic field on the billet surface. On the other hand, the proceeding speed of a billet in its production line had no significant effects. The result in this study may assist to reduce trial and error and to minimize the opportunity costs during the optimization process by applying the findings of this study into the operation condition in the steel billet production line.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Pressure Vessels and Piping
• /
• v.6 no.1
• /
• pp.16-22
• /
• 2010

Cast austenitic stainless steel(CASS) is used in the primary cooling piping system of nuclear power plant for it's relative low cost, corrosion resistance and easy of welding. However, the coarse-grain structure of cast austenitic stainless steel can strongly affect the inspectability of ultrasonic testing. The major problems encountered during inspection are beam skewing, high attenuation and high background noise of CASS component. So far, the best inspection performance involving CASS components have been achieved using low frequency TRL(Transmitter/Receiver side-by-side L wave) angle beam probe. But TRL technique could not detect shallow defect and it contains an uncertainty for sizing capability. Currently, most of researchers are studying to overcome these challenge issue. In this study, low-frequency phased array TRL technique used to detect and sizing the flaws in CF8A cast austenitic stainless steel.As conclusion, we could detect and size not only axial flaw but also circumferential flaw using low frequency phased array technique.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
• /
• v.28 no.6
• /
• pp.693-700
• /
• 2004

The probabilistic fracture mechanics(PFM) is a useful analytical tool to assess the integrity of reactor pressure vessel(RPV) at the event of pressurized thermal shock(PTS). In PFM, the probabilities of flaw initiation and propagation are estimated by comparing the applied stress intensity factor with the fracture toughness calculated by the simulation of various stochastic variables. It is known that the results of PFM analyses are dependent on the choice of the stochastic parameters and assumptions. Of the various variables and assumptions, we investigated the effects of the RT$_{NDT}$ shift equations, fracture toughness curves, and flaw distributions on the PFM results for the three PTS transients. The results showed that the combined effects of the RT$_{NDT}$ shift equations and fracture toughness curves are complicated and dependent on the characteristics of the transients, the chemistry of the materials, the fast neutron fluence, and so on.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers
• /
• v.12 no.2
• /
• pp.278-285
• /
• 1988

The Critical size of artificially induced micro-holes in 0.17%, 0.36% Carbon steel Specimens with Spheroidized Cementite and in 0.17% carbon steel specimens with martensite structure is compared with annealed pre-crack in order to discuss the physical meaning of the fatigue limit and evaluation of the tolerant micro flaw size at the stress level of the fatigue limit. Results obtained were summarized as follows; (1) In this study, non-propagating crack length of Smooth specimen and critical pre-crack length (lc) is coincide. (2) In the carbon steels with spheroidized cementite structure, critical pre-crack length (lc) and allowable micro-hole size (dc) is coincide each other at the fatigue limit level. (3) It has been published that there exists a particular size of micro-hole which has no effect on the fatigue limit. In this study, the micro-hole of critical size can be regarded as equivalent to a tolerant micro flaw which would not reduce the fatigue limit.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
• /
• v.23 no.5
• /
• pp.455-463
• /
• 2003

Adaptive noise cancellation techniques are ideally suitable for reducing spatially varying noise due to the grain structure of material in ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation. Grain noises have an un-correlation property, while flaw echoes are correlated. Thus, adaptive filtering algorithms use the correlation properties of signals to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the output signal. In this paper, a multi-stage adaptive noise cancellation (MANC) method using adaptive least mean square error (LMSE) filter for enhancing flaw detection in ultrasonic signals is proposed.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.20 no.1 s.68
• /
• pp.20-25
• /
• 2006

This paper deals with the design and aerodynamic analysis of a so-called 'ring-type' impulse turbine for wave energy conversion. Numerical analysis was performed using the CFD cock, FLUENT. The main idea of the proposed turbine rotor was to minimize the adverse effect of tip clearance of the turbine blade; the design was borrowed from a ducted propeller with connected ring tip for special purpose marine vehicles. Results show that the efficiency increases up to $10\%$, depending on flaw coefficient, with the higher flaw coefficient yielding better efficiency. Decrease of input coefficient CA was the main reason for higher efficiency. Performance of ring-type rotor at various design parameters, as well as flaw conditions, was investigated, and the advantages and the disadvantages of the present impulse turbine were also discussed.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
• /
• v.26 no.3
• /
• pp.505-513
• /
• 2002

During heatup and cooldown of pressurized water reactor, thermal stress was generated in the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) because of the temperature gradient. To prevent potential failure of RPV, pressure was required to be maintained below the P-T limit curves. In this paper, several methods for constructing the P-T limit curves including the ASME Sec. XI, App. G method were explained and the results were compared. Then, the effects of the various parameters such as flaw size, flaw orientation, cooldown rate, existence of chad, and reference fracture toughness, were evaluated. It was found that the current ASME Sec. XI App. G method resulted in the most conservative P-T limit curve. As the more accurate fracture mechanics analysis results were used, some of the conservatism can be removed. Among the parameters analysed, reference flaw orientation and reference fracture toughness curve had the greatest effect on the resulting P-T limit curves.