FIFTH CANADIAN CONFERENCE ON NONDESTRUCTIVE ... - IAEA

1. INTRODUCTION
- 67 -
Because of increased activity in the offshore exploration and
petro-chemical fields, a need has arisen within the research
community for a means of performing ultrasonic immersion
inspection on large, heavy section weldments.
Techno Scientific Inc. was contacted by the Physical Metallurgy
Research Laboratories (PMRL), at the Canadian Centre for Mineral
and Energy Technology (CANMET) to provide an inspection system
which would be suitable for this type of work. It was specified
that the system must:
i) include an immersion scanner having a capacity of
roughly 6 feet by k feet by 3 feet deep;
ii) support simultaneous collection and processing of data
from up to 8 transducers;
iii) allow long-term storage of test data with later
retrieval for processing and display;
iv) provide a level of flexibility in data collection and
processing methods appropriate to a research "tool".
The last point should be emphasized. While many automated
ultrasonic inspection systems have been described in the
literature (1-7), all have been designed for a particular type of
inspection, such as that of pipelines or composite panels, with
the display of test results limited to 1 or 2 standard modes.
2. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
The system can be divided into k major modules or subsystems:
î) a scanning bridge and immersion tank,
ii) a scanner controller,
iii) an ultrasonic signal processing subsystem,
iv) a data acquisition, storage, and display computer.
Two separate computer systems are included. The first, referred
to as the "host", provides the basic processing power and data
storage for the system, as well as coordinating the operations of
the the various subsystems. The second, or "slave" system,
includes a programmable scanner contr . 1er (which drives the
scanning bridge motors) and the ultrasonic signal processing
hardware. Figure 1 is an overall block diagram of the system,
showing the division between the host and slave units.