• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.373-380
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• 2000

It is useful to use NDE methods to assess the mechanical properties of materials since destructive methods are time-consuming and usually require cutting of sample from the material/component. In the present research, ultrasonic characteristics have been utilized to evaluate changes of mechanical properties due to heat treatment temperature and condition. The attenuation coefficient of ultrasonic wave increased as the heat treatment temperature because the grain size increased in size as the temperature. The attenuation coefficient decreased as the heat treatment has been progressed (quenched, tempered, PWHT). In the case of ultrasonic velocity measurement, velocity difference between quenched and tempered/PWHT was 40 m/s. There was a good relationship between the attenuation coefficient and the toughness. The relationship can be used for the nondestructive evaluation of the forged reactor vessels. Moreover, the method may be effectively used in the field application.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.25 no.6
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• pp.751-764
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• 2020

Real-time monitoring of stiffness and strength in cement based system has received significant attention in past few decades owing to the development of advanced techniques. Also, use of environment friendly supplementary cementitious materials (SCM) in cement, though gaining huge interest, severely affect the strength gain especially in early ages. Continuous monitoring of strength- and stiffness- gain using an efficient technique will systematically facilitate to choose the suitable time of removal of formwork for structures made with SCM incorporated concrete. This paper presents a technique for monitoring the strength and stiffness evolution in hydrating fly ash blended cement systems using electro-mechanical impedance (EMI) based technique. It is important to observe that the slower pozzolanic reactivity of fly ash blended cement systems could be effectively tracked using the evolution of equivalent local stiffness of the hydrating medium. Strength prediction models are proposed for estimating the strength and stiffness of the fly ash cement system, where curing age (in terms of hours/days) and the percentage replacement of cement by fly ash are the parameters. Evaluation of strength as obtained from EMI characteristics is validated with the results from destructive compression test and also compared with the same obtained from commonly used ultrasonic wave velocity (UPV). Statistical error indices indicate that the EMI technique is capable of predicting the strength of fly ash blended cement system more accurate than that from UPV. Further, the correlations between stiffness- and strength- gain over the time of hydration are also established. From the study, it is found that EMI based method can be effectively used for monitoring of strength gain in the fly ash incorporated cement system during hardening.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.77-83
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• 2006

Ultrasonic nonlinearity has been considered as a solution for the detection of microcracks or interfacial delamination in a layered structure. The distinguished phenomenon in nonlinear ultrasonics is the generation of higher-order harmonic waves during the propagation. Therefore, in order to quantify the nonlinearity, the conventional method measures a parameter defined as the amplitude ratio of a second-order harmonic component and a fundamental frequency component included in the propagated ultrasonic wave signal. However, its application In field inspection is not easy at the present stage because no standard methodology has yet been made to accurately estimate this parameter. Thus, the aim of this paper is to propose an advanced signal processing technique for the precise estimation of a nonlinear ultrasonic parameter, which is based on power spectral and bispectral analysis. The method of estimating power spectrum and bispectrum of the pulse-like ultrasonic wave signal used in the commercial SAM (scanning acoustic microscopy) equipment is especially considered in this study The usefulness of the proposed method Is confirmed by experiments for a Newton ring with a continuous air gap between two glasses and a real semiconductor sample with local delaminations. The results show that the nonlinear parameter obtained tv the proposed method had a good correlation with the delamination.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.439-445
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• 2001

The destructive method is reliable and widely used lot 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 used at high temperature by nondestructive evaluation such as electric resistance method, replica method, Barkhausen noise method, electro-chemical method and ultrasonic method are strongly desired. Ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation technique has been reported good to attain efficiency of measurement, high sensitivity of measurement, and rapidity and reliability of result interpretation. In this study, it was verified experimentally the feasibility of the evaluation of degraded 2.25Cr-1Mo steel specimens which were prepared by the isothermal aging heat treatment at $630^{\circ}C$ by high frequency longitudinal wave method investigating the change of attenuation coefficient by FFT analysis and wavelet transform. Because of carbide precipitation increase and spheroidization near grain boundary of microstructure to aging degradation, attenuation coefficient had a tendency to increase as degradation proceeded. It was identified possibly to evaluate degradation using the characteristics of high-frequency ultrasonics. Frequency dependence of ultrasonic attenuation coefficient to aging degradation appeared large, which made sure that attenuation coefficient is an important parameter for evaluation of aging degradation.