Research on Optimization of Water Jet Coupling System Parameters in Automated Ultrasonic Phased Array Inspection

Abstract

When ultrasonic testing is used for non-destructive testing of welded workpieces, the surface of the ultrasonic transducer or wedge should have a good coupling effect with the measured surface of the workpiece. However, in actual ultrasonic testing, it is difficult to ensure that the ultrasonic transducer completes uniform scanning, resulting in poor coupling between the probe and the workpiece, resulting in low acoustic coupling stability of ultrasonic testing. In view of the above problems, this paper designs and constructs an automated ultrasonic phased array inspection platform using water jet coupling. By taking water flow rate, coupling distance, and transducer center frequency as independent variable parameters of the water jet coupling system, and using the received sound wave amplitude as the response variable for experimental comparison, a response surface analysis is conducted on these parameters to optimize the detection resolution of the automated ultrasonic inspection system. The results show that the most accurate system detection results are achieved when the water flow rate is 0.4 L/min, the coupling distance is between 1.0-1.6 mm, and the transducer center frequency is 10 MHz. This effectively solves the problem of low stability in ultrasound detection coupling, improves the detection efficiency, and provides guidance for further research on the imaging effect of automated ultrasonic phased array inspection in subsequent studies.