Investigation into the use of zero angle ultrasonic probe array for defect detection and location

Abstract

The steel industry like any other manufacturing process is under constant pressure to deliver higher quality defect free material at lower cost to customers. This push for zero defects has led to improved manufacturing processes and the need for more reliable, faster defect testing methods. Ultrasound fundamentally provides a mechanical stress, produced by tensile, compressive, shearing or flexural forces, which are of such low intensity that no material damage occurs. The remit of the project was to investigate and develop the latent potential within the Present automated ultrasonic immersion system using an array of normal angle probes, used for billet inspection. The work presented in this thesis describes the research undertaken to develop a system using, 10mm diameter, standard zero angled 5MHz ultrasonic transducers. The transducers were used at linear separation distances of between 22.5mm and 45mm set in a typical 8-probe array orientation. The developed technique is potentially transferable to other ultrasonic multi-probe array applications and demonstrates that time of flight diffraction can be realised using normal probes, and termed Normal Probe Diffraction, (NPD). The technique located defects, using the intersection of ellipses, with an error of <0.5% of the signal transit distance and, with the application of a correlation filter, improved the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) from—20dB to 17.0dB.