• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.317-323
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• 2010

The manual ultrasonic examination for the nuclear power plant piping welds has been demonstrated by using KPD(Korean Performance Demonstration) generic procedure. For automated ultrasonic examination, there is no generic procedure and it should be qualified by using applicable automated equipment. Until now, most of qualified procedures used pulse-echo technique and there is no qualified procedure using phased array technique. In this study, data acquisition and analysis software were developed and phased-array transducer and wedge were designed to implement phased array technique for nuclear power plant in-service inspection. The developed procedure are qualified for performance demonstration for the flaw detection, length sizing and depth sizing. The qualified procedure will be applied for the field examination in the nuclear power plant piping weld inspection.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.254-259
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• 2014

A pressurized heavy water reactor (PHWR) core has 380 fuel channels contained and supported by a horizontal cylindrical vessel known as the calandria, whereas a pressurized water reactor (PWR) has only a single reactor vessel. The pressure tube, which is a pressure-retaining component, has a 103.4 mm inside diameter ${\times}$ 4.19 mm wall thickness, and is 6.36 m long, made of a zirconium alloy (Zr-2.5 wt% Nb). This provides support for the fuel while transporting the $D_2O$ heat-transfer fluid. The simple tubular geometry invites highly automated inspection, and good approach for all inspection. Similar to all nuclear heat-transfer pressure boundaries, the PHWR pressure tube requires a rigorous, periodic inspection to assess the reactor integrity in accordance with the Korea Nuclear Safety Committee law. Volumetric-based nondestructive evaluation (NDE) techniques utilizing ultrasonic and eddy current testing have been adopted for use in the periodic inspection of the fuel channel. The eddy current testing, as a supplemental NDE method to ultrasonic testing, is used to confirm the flaws primarily detected through ultrasonic testing, however, eddy current testing offers a significant advantage in that its ability to detect surface flaws is superior to that of ultrasonic testing. In this paper, effectiveness of flaw detection and the depth sizing capability by eddy current testing for the inside surface of a pressure tube, will be introduced. As a result of this examination, the ET technique is found to be useful only as a detection technique for defects because it can detect fine defects on the surface with high resolution. However, the ET technique is not recommended for use as a depth sizing method because it has a large degree of error for depth sizing.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.21 no.11
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• pp.53-60
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• 2020

The bogies of railway vehicles are one of the most critical components for service. Fatigue defects in the bogie can be initiated for various reasons, such as material imperfection, welding defects, and unpredictable and excessive overloads during operation. To prevent the derailment of a railway vehicle, it is necessary to evaluate and detect the defect of a connection weldment between the car body and bogie accurately. The safety of the bogie weldment was checked using an ultrasonic test, and it is necessary to determine the occurrence of defects using a learning method. Recently, studies on deep learning have been performed to identify defects with a high recognition rate with respect to a fine and similar defect. In this paper, the databases of weldment specimens with artificial defects were constructed to detect the defect of a bogie weldment. The ultrasonic inspection using the wedge angle was performed to understand the detection ability of fatigue cracks. In addition, the convolutional neural network was applied to minimize human error during the inspection. The results showed that the defects of connection weldment between the car body and bogie could be classified with more than 99.98% accuracy using CNN, and the effectiveness can be verified in the case of an inspection.

• 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.36 no.3
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• pp.195-201
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• 2016

Eddy current testing (ECT) is commonly applied for the inspection of automated production lines of metallic products, because it has a high inspection speed and a reasonable price. When ECT is applied for the inspection of a metallic object having an uneven target surface, such as the spline gear of a spline shaft, it is difficult to distinguish between the original signal obtained from the sensor and the signal generated by a defect because of the relatively large surface signals having similar frequency distributions. To facilitate the detection of defect signals from the spline gear, implementation of high-order filters is essential, so that the fault signals can be distinguished from the surrounding noise signals, and simultaneously, the pass-band of the filter can be adjusted according to the status of each production line and the object to be inspected. We will examine the infinite impulse filters (IIR filters) available for implementing an advanced filter for ECT, and attempt to detect the flaw signals through optimization of system design parameters for detecting the signals at the system level.