Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition based methodology for ultrasonic testing of coarse grain austenitic stainless steels

Abstract

A signal processing methodology is proposed in this paper for effective reconstruction of ultrasonic signals in coarse grained high scattering austenitic stainless steel. The proposed methodology is comprised of the Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) processing of ultrasonic signals and application of signal minimisation algorithm on selected Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) obtained by EEMD. The methodology is applied to ultrasonic signals obtained from austenitic stainless steel specimens of different grain size, with and without defects. The influence of probe frequency and data length of a signal on EEMD decomposition is also investigated. For a particular sampling rate and probe frequency, the same range of IMFs can be used to reconstruct the ultrasonic signal, irrespective of the grain size in the range of 30–210μm investigated in this study. This methodology is successfully employed for detection of defects in a 50mm thick coarse grain austenitic stainless steel specimens. Signal to noise ratio improvement of better than 15dB is observed for the ultrasonic signal obtained from a 25mm deep flat bottom hole in 200μm grain size specimen. For ultrasonic signals obtained from defects at different depths, a minimum of 7dB extra enhancement in SNR is achieved as compared to the sum of selected IMF approach. The application of minimisation algorithm with EEMD processed signal in the proposed methodology proves to be effective for adaptive signal reconstruction with improved signal to noise ratio. This methodology was further employed for successful imaging of defects in a B-scan.