• Transactions of the Korean Society of Pressure Vessels and Piping
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.14-19
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• 2009

NDE(Nondestructive examination) detects a flaw or discontinuity in materials. Flaws detected by the examination shall be evaluated for the decision basis of the integrity. The internal flaws of forging products can be detected by UT. However, UT has detection limits because of its reflected signal weakness. Normally, a 1mm or less flaw is known as the limit. If a flaw was detected, the size of flaw would be evaluated by AVG(or DGS) technique. To verify the evaluation data, alternative examination methods are needed. But there is no alternative examination methods until now. In this study, Phased array ultrasonic technique can be used to size the flaws in the generator rotor with focused beam of ultrasonic wave as a supplement method of AVG. Also, the phased array ultrasonic technique described enables the shape of flaw to be depicted exactly.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.22-25
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• 2012

Welding and/or fusion in polyethylene(PE) system made on site is focused on the control of the welding or fusion process to follow proper procedure. The process control is important, but it is not sufficient for the long term reliability of a pipe system. To achieve the rate of failure close to zero, Non Destructive Testing(NDT) is necessary in addition to joining process control. For electrofusion joints several non-destructive testing methods are available. The ultrasonic phased array technique is possible to detect various defects including wire deviations and regions with lack of fusion. In this studies, testing was carried to detect the defect after electrofusion joining of polyethylene piping is utilized by the ultrasonic phased array technique. From testing data, ultrasonic phased array technique is recommended as a reliable non-destructive testing method.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Pressure Vessels and Piping
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.8-14
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• 2013

Steam turbine blades and discs of nuclear power plants are one of the most highly stressed areas of turbine rotor, and periodic inspection of the blade roots is essential for monitoring integrity and preventing turbine failure. Ultrasonic technique is applied for volumetric inspection of blade root. However, the complexity of blade root geometry imposes challenges to inspection of blades and discs. Recently, phased array ultrasonic inspection technology is being applied to numerous power generation inspection applications including turbine rotor. The phased array ultrasonic technique requires customized inspection wedges which are generally necessary to generate effectively higher incident angle. But the usage of this wedge can cause access limitation for the lower stage blades of turbine because of the wedge front length. Therefore, the shear wave phased array probe which can generate high inspection angle without wedge is essentially necessary. In this study, feasibility study is conducted for the shear wave phased array ultrasonic probe application to blade and disc inspection. As results, the experimental results show that the shear wave phased array probe can detect the flaw and measure its size with reliable accuracy. Therefore if this shear wave phased array probe is applied to field inspection of blade and disc, more reliable inspection is expected for turbine having access limitation.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.440-446
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• 2006

The reactor vessel body and closure head are fastened with the stud bolt that is one of crucial parts for safety of the reactor vessels in nuclear power plants. It is reported that the stud bolt is often experienced by fatigue cracks initiated at threads. Stud bolts are inspected by the ultrasonic technique during the overhaul periodically for the prevention of failure which leads to radioactive leakage from the nuclear reactor. The conventional ultrasonic inspection for stud bolts was mainly conducted by reflected echo method based on shadow effect. However, in this technique, there were numerous spurious signals reflected from every oblique surfaces of the thread. In this study, ultrasonic phased array technique was applied to investigate detectability of flaws in stud bolts and characteristics of ultrasonic images corresponding to different scanning methods, that is, sector and linear scan. For this purpose, simplified stud bolt specimens with artificial defects of various depths were prepared.

• Journal of Applied Reliability
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.338-346
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• 2016

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to improve the reliability of the composite material blades used for the wind power generator, by applying the phased array ultrasonic testing technique out of the many nondestructive test into the blades. Method: The wind power generation composite blades are used, as a case study, in order to evaluate the reliability of the phased array ultrasonic testing technique. Defects that are most likely occurred in the field are injected into the different locations of the three different types of artificial test pieces and then phased array ultrasonic testing technique are applied to evaluate the reliability of its effectiveness. Result: As a result of the analysis of the defect signals by applying the A scan and B scan simultaneously, depth and width of the defect could be obtained. An area of defect was proportional to the amount of energy by color in B scan image. The larger amount of energy, reflected amount of energy was appeared in the order of red, orange, yellow, blue color. Conclusion: The most reliable testing method to detect the defect in composite blades for wind power generation is considered to be the combination of the other destructive testing technique with the phased array ultrasonic testing since the PAUT alone could not detect all range of the defects in the blades.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.304-310
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• 2005

The techniques in order to measure the depth of defect in weldment and structure accurately have been developed. Many researches have made efforts to develop the methods for the accurate depth sizing of defect. TOFD is known as the most accurate method of various methods for measuring depth sizing. However, there is a possibility to miss defects because of the limitation of beam coverage for the ultrasound incident angle. In this study, the results for detectability and depth sizing using phased array ultrasonic technique for thick body were compared with those of conventional TOFD technique. It was experimentally confirmed that the phased array ultrasonic TOFD technique gives good detectability and accurate depth measurement for the various types of defects. The phased array ultrasonic TOFD technique developed in this study will contribute to increase the inspection reliability in thick component such as the pressure vessel of power generation industry.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.48 no.1
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• pp.228-235
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• 2016

Flaws at dissimilar metal welds (DMWs), such as reactor coolant systems components, Control Rod Drive Mechanism (CRDM), Bottom Mounted Instrumentation (BMI) etc., in nuclear power plants have been found. Notably, primary water stress corrosion cracking (PWSCC) in the DMWs could cause significant reliability problems at nuclear power plants. Therefore, phased array ultrasound is widely used for inspecting surface break cracks and stress corrosion cracks in DMWs. However, inspection of DMWs using phased array ultrasound has a relatively low probability of detection of cracks, because the crystalline structure of welds causes distortion and splitting of the ultrasonic beams which propagates anisotropic medium. Therefore, advanced evaluation techniques of phased array ultrasound are needed for improvement in the probability of detection of flaws in DMWs. Thus, in this study, an investigation of focusing and steering phased array ultrasound in DMWs was carried out using a time reversal technique, and an adaptive focusing technique based on finite element method (FEM) simulation. Also, evaluation of focusing performance of three different focusing techniques was performed by comparing amplitude of phased array ultrasonic signals scattered from the targeted flaw with three different time delays.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.185-191
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• 2012

Typically, a wedge is involved to generate effectively high inspection angle in pipe weld inspection using phased array ultrasonic technique. But the usage of this wedge for weld or access limited area can cause coverage limitation for the examination volume because of the wedge front length. Therefore, the shear wave phased array probe which can generate high inspection angle without wedge is essentially necessary. In this paper, the shear wave phased array ultrasonic probe which can generate high inspection angle designed by modeling and manufactured from the modelling result. And this shear wave probe tested whether it can detect and sizing for EDM test block that contains various depth. As results, the experimental results show that the designed shear wave phased array probe can detect and size with reliable accuracy. Therefore if this phased array probe apply in field inspection, it is expected that it show more reliable inspection result for plant structure having access limitation.

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

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.13-20
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• 2017

A conventional phased array ultrasonic system offers the ability to steer an ultrasonic beam by applying independent time delays of individual elements in the array and produce an ultrasonic image. In contrast, full matrix capture (FMC) is a data acquisition process that collects a complete matrix of A-scans from every possible independent transmit-receive combination in a phased array transducer and makes it possible to reconstruct various images that cannot be produced by conventional phased array with the post processing as well as images equivalent to a conventional phased array image. In this paper, a basic algorithm based on the LLL mode total focusing method (TFM) that can image crack type flaws is described. And this technique was applied to reconstruct flaw images from the FMC dataset obtained from the experiments and ultrasonic simulation.