Determination of Incident Angle and Position of Optimal Mode Ultrasonic Beam for Flaw Detection in Anisotropic and Inhomogeneous Weldments by Ray Tracing

Determination of Incident Angle and Position of Optimal Mode Ultrasonic Beam for Flaw Detection in Anisotropic and Inhomogeneous Weldments by Ray Tracing

Ultrasonic inspection of austenitic steel weldments is a truly difficult task due to complicated wave propagation phenomena such as beam skewing, splitting and distortion. In order to understand these phenomena and design proper inspection procedures, simulation is increasingly paid more attention to. This article addresses a ray tracing based approach to determine incident angle and position of optimal wave mode ultrasonic beam for flaw detection in anisotropic and inhomogeneous austenitic steel weldments. Specially, the optimal mode of ultrasonic wave wave is selected by ray tracing simulation, and an optimization approach based on ray tracing and bi-section search is proposed in order to find the ray path connecting two given points in weldments. With help of this approach, the optimal incident angle and position of ultrasonic beam can be determined for a given flaw position.