L52023 Inspection of Welds in Thin-Wall Pipe Using Mechanized Ultrasonic Inspection

Abstract

Generally, the inspection of welds in pipes with a wall thickness less than 6 mm is performed using radiography.� Because radiography is very sensitive to the orientation of planar weld defects, these types of defects often go undetected.� In contrast, ultrasonic testing (UT) offers a better solution for detecting and sizing of these defects. In this project a method to inspect welds in thin-walled pipe less than 6-mm thick using mechanized ultrasonic weld inspection was developed.�The project investigated the application of time-based high-frequency (up to 15 MHz) single/multi-probe techniques and phased-array (PA) technology, multiple-skip time-of-flight diffraction (TOFD), and shear horizontal (SH) waves inspection as possible solutions.