ULTRASONIC PHASED ARRAY INSPECTION OF FLAWS ON WELD FUSION FACES USING FULL MATRIX CAPTURE

Work is being conducted to develop phased array inspection of stainless steel welded pipes. Ideally this uses waves reflected and mode converted at the inner surface of the pipe, but most commercial phased array controllers do not currently provide for this. Our solution was to use Full Matrix Capture (FMC) and process the data ourselves. This paper explains the FMC principle, describes the signal processing algorithms along with introducing the Almost Total Focusing Method (ATFM) and illustrates how the processed data was presented. The inspections were also modeled using the CEA CIVA software and compared to experimental results.