Title: Defect detection of curved thin shell based on ultrasonic transducer array

Authors: Xipeng Li; Chunguang Xu; Liu Yang; Lijiu Wang; Hongjuan Yan

Addresses: School of Mechanical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, No. 5, Zhongguancun South Street, Haidian District, Beijing 100081, China ' School of Mechanical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, No. 5, Zhongguancun South Street, Haidian District, Beijing 100081, China ' School of Mechanical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, No. 5, Zhongguancun South Street, Haidian District, Beijing 100081, China ' School of Mechanical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, No. 5, Zhongguancun South Street, Haidian District, Beijing 100081, China ' School of Mechanical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, No. 5, Zhongguancun South Street, Haidian District, Beijing 100081, China

Abstract: The curved spherical thin shell structures are widely used in the practical industrial applications, because of the defects in it, a lot of major accidents occurred and caused significant economic losses. So monitoring and quantifying the defects in curved plate structure are studied here. On the basis of the fundamental theory of the guide wave that propagating in the curved thin shell, and by solving and analysing the guide wave's dispersion, the guide wave's inspiring method has been obtained from the wave-mode conversion. The ellipse localisation imaging algorithm is applied to identify the defect's orientation and localisation accurately. Wavelet transform is used to obtain the defect's location parameters. A series of experiments for detecting the artificial defect at the specimen have shown that the defect's direction and location can be detected effectively.

Keywords: guide waves; dispersion; nondestructive evaluation; NDE; defect detection; curved thin shells; ultrasonic transducer arrays; ellipse localisation imaging; defect orientation; defect localisation; wavelet transform; nondestructive testing; NDT.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMMP.2014.066907

International Journal of Microstructure and Materials Properties, 2014 Vol.9 No.3/4/5, pp.224 - 239

Published online: 16 Jan 2015 *

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