Non-contact Ultrasonic Inspection Technology of Fillet Weldments

Park, Ik-Keun; Lee, Chul-Ky; Kim, Hyun-Mook; Park, Tae-Sung; Kim, Yong-Kwon; Cho, Yong-Sang; Song, Won-Joon; Ahn, Houng-Kun

Journal of KWJS 2005;23(5):38-43.
Published online November 11, 2005.

Non-contact Ultrasonic Inspection Technology of Fillet Weldments

Ik-Keun Park, Chul-Ky Lee, Hyun-Mook Kim, Tae-Sung Park, Yong-Kwon Kim, Yong-Sang Cho, Won-Joon Song, Houng-Kun Ahn

Abstract

The non-destructive Inspection of the fillet weldment has difficulties due to its geometrical complexity and uneasy access. The surface shear horizontal wave (SH-wave), however, has been successfully applied to the detection of cracks on the surface and sub-surface of the fillet weldment heel part. The conventional ultrasonic inspection using the surface SH-wave is usually a contact method using piezoelectric transducer. Thus, it is not suitable for a field application because the reliability and repeatability of inspection are significantly affected by test conditions such as couplant, contact pressure and pre-process. In order to overcome this problem, a non-contact SH-wave inspection method using EMAT is propose. The experimental results with this non-contact method are compared with those with a conventional ultrasonic method in fillet weldment with slit type defects. It is shown that the non-contact inspection technique requires simple procedure and less time in the fillet weldment inspection.