Modeling the Effect of Roughness on Ultrasonic Scattering in 2D and 3D

With the advances of ultrasonic sensor technology, permanent installation of sensors and/or automation of scanning equipment the effect of human errors in NDE can be reduced and it is the unknown boundary conditions of the physics that determine the underlying scatter of the response of a sensor system. The authors have developed a fast and efficient acoustic model that predicts the scatter from rough boundaries and calculates the resultant ultrasonic signal. The predicted responses have been experimentally validated and show good agreement between theory and experiment. A statistical approach is needed to evaluate the response distribution for many different setups and simulation times in 3D can be prohibitive. Therefore a simplification approach that allows description of the 3D response by a 2D model is described for a particular application. This allows the simulation of full statistical distributions of defect populations in a few minutes.