• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.140-145
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• 2010

This study presents a detection method for mechanically fabricated defects on underwater steel pipes, using ultrasonic guided waves. Three different diameters (60, 90, and 114 mm) of 1000-mm long steel pipes were considered, along with several experimental design factors such as incident angles, incident distances, and the degrees of defects, to investigate how these factors affected the experimental results - the detectability of the mechanical defects. From the experimental results, we determined that the amplitude and arrival time of the first received wave signals gave a promising clue for distinguishing the existence of the defects and their severities. Between the amplitude and arrival time, the arrival time gave a more promising indication since it was affected by the experimental factors in a constant manner. Therefore, it was shown that the use of ultrasonic guided waves for underwater pipe inspection is feasible.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Pressure Vessels and Piping
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.26-30
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• 2011

In order to ship low & Intermediate level radioactive waste drums, which have been temporarily stored on site, to a disposal facility, their physical and chemical properties should be evaluated and proven to meet the acceptance guideline prior to their shipment. Ultrasonic velocity method, which has been used to estimate the strength of concrete, can be suggested to evaluate the compressive strength of solidified radioactive waste, which is one of the evaluated properties. The strength is estimated from acoustic velocity. However, a guided wave traveling along a drum is generated when applying ultrasonic method to the drum, and this makes it difficult to analyze the signal due to overlap between transmitted wave through the contents in drum and the guided wave. This paper reported feasibility of ultrasonic method to evaluate of the compressive strength of the solidified LLW. It is observed that the guide wave is greater than transmitted wave, and ultrasonic velocity could be estimated from transmitted wave signal arriving prior to the guided wave

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.29-35
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• 2015

Pipes, commonly used in energy and petrochemical facilities, have various types of defects induced by diverse factors and this is often issued in NDE society. Ultrasonic guided wave inspection method are normally adopted to insure the healthiness of industry pipes. Recently, ultrasonic guided wave inspection is shifted to adopt arrayed probes and system. And here we developed an array guided wave ultrasonic testing system can adapt arrayed probes and focusing methods. In this paper, an array guided wave ultrasonic testing system is presented including a transmitting focusing technique and flaw signal level enhancement.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.301-309
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• 2022

Protective coatings are most widely used anticorrosive structures for steel structures. The corrosion under the coating damages the host material, but this damage is completely hidden. Therefore, a field-applicable under-coating-corrosion visualization method has been desired for a long time. Laser ultrasonic technology has been studied in various fields as an in situ nondestructive inspection method. In this study, a comparative analysis was carried out between a guided-wave ultrasonic propagation imager (UPI) and pulse-echo UPI, which have the potential to be used in the field of under-coating-corrosion management. Both guided-wave UPI and pulse-echo UPI were able to successfully visualize the corrosion. Regarding the field application, the guided-wave UPI performing Q-switch laser scanning and piezoelectric sensing by magnetic attachment exhibited advantages owing to the larger distance and incident angle in the laser measurement than those of the pulse-echo UPI. Regarding the corrosion visualization methods, the combination of adjacent wave subtraction and variable time window amplitude mapping (VTWAM) provided acceptable results for the guided-wave UPI, while VTWAM was sufficient for the pule-echo UPI. In addition, the capability of multiple sensing in a single channel of the guided-wave UPI could improve the field applicability as well as the relatively smaller size of the system. Thus, we propose a guided-wave UPI as a tool for under-coating-corrosion management.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.481-493
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• 2018

Ultrasonic guided waves have attracted increasing attention for non-destructive testing (NDT) and structural health monitoring (SHM) of bridge cables. They offer advantages like single measurement, wide coverage of acoustical field, and long-range propagation capability. To design defect detection systems, it is essential to understand how guided waves propagate in cables and how to select the optimal excitation frequency and mode. However, certain cable characteristics such as multiple wires, anchorage, and polyethylene (PE) sheath increase the complexity in analyzing the guided wave propagation. In this study, guided wave modes for multi-wire bridge cables are identified by using a semi-analytical finite element (SAFE) technique to obtain relevant dispersion curves. Numerical results indicated that the number of guided wave modes increases, the length of the flat region with a low frequency of L(0,1) mode becomes shorter, and the cutoff frequency for high order longitudinal wave modes becomes lower, as the number of steel wires in a cable increases. These findings were used in design of transducers for defect detection and selection of the optimal wave mode and frequency for subsequent experiments. A magnetostrictive transducer system was used to excite and detect the guided waves. The applicability of the proposed approach for detecting and locating wire breakages was demonstrated for a cable with 37 wires. The present ultrasonic guided wave method has been found to be very responsive to the number of brokenwires and is thus capable of detecting defects with varying sizes.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.20-26
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• 2005

Ultrasonic guided waves have been widely employed for long range inspection of structures such as plates, rods and pipes. There are numerous modes with different wave velocities, and the appropriate mode selection is one of key techniques in the application of guided waves. In the present work, phase tuning by an array transducer was applied to generate ultrasonic guided waves. For this purpose, 8-channel ultrasonic pulser/receiver and their controller which enables sequential activation of each channels with given time delay were developed. Eight transducers were fabricated in order to generate guided waves by using an array transducer. The selective tuning of wave mode can be achieved by changing the interval between elements of an array transducer.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Machine Tool Engineers Conference
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• 2001.10a
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• pp.324-329
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• 2001

The destructive method is reliable and widely used for the estimation of material degradation but, it have time-consuming and a great difficulty in preparing specimens from in-service industrial facilities. Therefore, the estimation of degraded structural materials by nondestructive evaluation is strongly desired. In this paper, the use of guided wave was suggested for the evaluation of thermally damaged 2.25 Cr-lMo steel as an alternative way to compensate for limitations of fracture tests. The observation of microstructure variations of the material including carbide precipitation increase and spheroidization near grain boundary was conducted and the correlation with the guided wave features such as energy loss ratio and group velocity changes was investigated. Through this study, the feasibility of ultrasonic guided wave evaluation for thermally damaged materials was explored.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.1055-1065
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• 2016

An anisotropic ultrasonic transducer is proposed for Lamb wave applications, such as passive damage or impact localization based on ultrasonic guided wave theory. This transducer is made from a PMNPT single crystal, and has different piezoelectric coefficients $d_{31}$ and $d_{32}$, which are the same for the conventional piezoelectric materials, such as Lead zirconate titanate (PZT). Different piezoelectric coefficients result in directionality of guided wave generated by this transducer, in other words, it is an anisotropic ultrasonic transducer. And thus, it has different sensitivity in comparison with conventional ultrasonic transducer. The anisotropic one can provide more information related to the direction when it is used as sensors. This paper first shows its detailed properties, including analytical formulae and finite elements simulations. Then, its application is described.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.331-340
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• 2004

Deployment of an advanced on-line monitoring of the component integrity offers a prospect of improved performance, enhanced safety, and reduced overall cost for nuclear power plants. Ultrasonic guided waves have been known as one of the promising techniques that could be utilized for on-line monitoring. The present work is aimed at developing a new method for on-line monitoring of the pipes during the operation period of nuclear power plants. For this purpose, the steam generator (S/G) tube was selected as an object of tile experiment. Dispersion corves and the incident angles corresponding to the specific modes were calculated for the S/G tube. The modes of guided waves were identified by the time-frequency diagrams obtained by the short time Fourier transform. It was experimentally confirmed that there was no mode conversion when the ultrasonic guided waves passed over the curved region of the S/G tube. An optimum mode of guided wave for the S/G tube was suggested and verified by the experiment.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2014.10a
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• pp.550-554
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• 2014

Regarding thin films in MEMS/NEMS structures, the exact evaluation of mechanical properties is very essential to enhance the reliability of their design and manufacturing. However, such methods as a tensile test and a resonance test, general methods to measure elastic moduli, cannot be applied to thin films since its thickness is so small. This work concerns guided wave based elastic modulus measurement method. To this end, guided wave excitation and detection system using a pulsed laser and a laser interferometry has been established. Also an elastic modulus extraction algorithm from the measured guided wave signal was developed. Finally, it was applied to actual thin film structures such as Ni-Si and Al-Si multilayers. From experimental results, we confirm that the proposed method has considerable feasibility to measure elastic properties of thin films.