ULTRASONIC NONDESTRUCTIVE EVALUATION OF STRESS CORROSION CRACK IN WELDED STEEL PLATE

Stress corrosion cracking (SCC) has been observed in the high-level nuclear waste tanks that were constructed by welding carbon steel plates. This paper aims to establish an ultrasonic inspection system and its fundamental ability for SCC inspection and quantification on thick welded steel plates. A welded steel plate was fabricated without heat treatment by joining two carbon steel plates through gas metal arc welding (GMAW) procedure. SCC growth, which was initiated with starter cracks across the weld, were observed in a few weeks after submerging the plate in 5 molar (5M) sodium nitrate (NaNO3) solution at about 90 degrees C. The SCC is inspected with an ultrasonic guided wave system, which employs a piezoelectric transducer for guided wave actuation and a scanning laser Doppler vibrometer (SLDV) for wavefield sensing. The measured wavefield can immediately show wave interactions with the crack. Wavefield images are further generated for the crack length quantification. To demonstrate the crack sizing capability of using the piezoelectric transducer and SLDV, the previous results from the magnetic particle test (MT) are compared. Reasonable agreement in crack length measurement is obtained with the ultrasonic test imaging technique.