Chaoticity Evaluation of Ultrasonic Signals in Welding Defects by 6dB Drop Method

Abstract

This study proposes the analysis and evaluation method of time series ultrasonic signal using the chaotic feature extraction for ultrasonic pattern recognition. Features extracted from time series data using the chaotic time series signal analysis quantitatively welding defects. For this purpose analysis objective in this study is fractal dimension and Lyapunov exponent. Trajectory changes in the strange attractor indicated that even same type of defects carried substantial difference in chaoticity resulting from distance shills such as 0.5 and 1.0 skip distance. Such differences in chaoticity enables the evaluation of unique features of defects in the weld zone. In experiment fractal(correlation) dimension and Lyapunov exponent extracted from 6dB ultrasonic defect signals of weld zone showed chaoticity. In quantitative chaotic feature extraction, feature values(mean values) of 4.2690 and 0.0907 in the case of porosity and 4.2432 and 0.0888 in the case of incomplete penetration were proposed on the basis of fractal dimension and Lyapunov exponent. Proposed chaotic feature extraction in this study enhances ultrasonic pattern recognition results from defect signals of weld zone such as vertical hole.