Phased Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducer Arrays For Enhanced Ultrasonic Inspection

In this Special Issue of Sensors, seven peer-reviewed manuscripts appear on the topic of ultrasonic transducer design and operation in harsh environments: elevated temperature, high gamma and neutron radiation fields, or the presence of aggressive chemicals. Motivations for these research and development projects are strongly focused on nuclear power plant inspections (particularly liquid-sodium cooled reactors), and nondestructive testing of high-temperature piping installations. It is anticipated that extensive use of permanently mounted robust transducers for in-service monitoring of petrochemical plants and power generations stations; quality control in manufacturing plants; and primary and secondary process monitoring in the fabrication of engineering materials will soon be made.

Non-Destructive Testing, Volume 4 contains the proceedings of the Fourth European Conference held in London on September 13-17, 1987. Contributors explore a variety of topics related to non-destructive testing (NDT), including ultrasonic techniques, ultrasonic systems, electromagnetic techniques, condition monitoring of plant and structures, and magnetic particle and penetrant techniques. This text is comprised of 98 chapters; the first of which describes an ultrasonic technique for the assessment of the fat content of live beef animals for breeding purposes. Attention then turns to measurements of the longitudinal ultrasonic wave attenuation in spheroidal graphite iron test pieces subjected to fatigue loads. The chapters that follow focus on ultrasonic imaging; dry coupling probes; an expert system for ultrasonic examination of fuel rods; engineering and medical applications of diagnostic ultrasound; and signal processing of 3D maps of eddy currents. The reader is also methodically introduced to automation of eddy current testing; the use of artificial intelligence in vibration-based health monitoring; automated inspection of magnetic particles; and the theory and practice of acoustic emission. This text concludes with a chapter that reviews the NDT research program of the National NDT Center of Harwell Laboratory in the UK. This book will be of interest to materials scientists, materials engineers, and metallurgists.

The proceedings of a conference organized by the European Commission Joint Research Centre Institute of Advanced Materials. The conference was held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands in October 1998 and covered all aspects of this highly important subject including links between structural integrity requirements and NDE performance. The development of performance demonstration / qualification for NDE systems and experiance of their application in practice feature prominently. Development of improved NDE systems, new methods of NDE and methods for assessing NDE performance such as modeling are also included.

EMATs for Science and Industry comprises the physical principles of electromagnetic acoustic transducers (EMATs) and the applications to scientific and industrial ultrasonic measurements on materials. The text is arranged in four parts: -PART I is intended to be a self-contained description of the basic elements of coupling mechanism along with practical designing of EMATs for various purposes. There are several implementations to compensate for the low transfer efficiency of the EMATs. Useful tips to make an EMAT are also presented. -PART II describes the principle of electromagnetic acoustic resonance (EMAR), which makes the most of contactless nature of EMATs and is the most successful amplification mechanism for precise velocity and attenuation measurements. -PART III applies EMAR to studying the physical acoustics. New measurements emerged on three major subjects; in situ monitoring of dislocation behavior, determination of anisotropic elastic constants, and acoustic nonlinearity evolution. -PART IV deals with a variety of individual topics encountered in industrial applications, for which the EMATs are believed to the best solutions.

This authoritative and up-to-date series provides a comprehensive review of the latest research results in quantitative nondestructive evaluation (NDE). Leading investigators working in government agencies, major industries, and universities present a broad spectrum of work extending from basic research to early engineering applications.

The propagation of ultrasonic guided waves in solids is an important area of scientific inquiry, primarily due to their practical applications for nondestructive characterization of materials, such as nondestructive inspection, quality assurance testing, structural health monitoring, and providing a material state awareness. This Special Issue of Applied Sciences covers all aspects of ultrasonic guided waves (e.g., phased array transducers, meta-materials to control wave propagation characteristics, scattering, attenuation, and signal processing techniques) from the perspective of modeling, simulation, laboratory experiments, or field testing. In order to fully utilize ultrasonic guided waves for these applications, it is necessary to have a firm grasp of their requisite characteristics, which include that they are multimodal, dispersive, and are comprised of unique displacement profiles through the thickness of the waveguide.