Immersion techniques for automated ultrasonic inspection of curved parts

The general problem of automatically inspecting simple and complex curved parts using ultrasonic immersion and squirter methods is very challenging. The water path and angle of incidence must be held constant with a high degree of accuracy or the inspection is not valid. The problem is even more difficult when the scan speed must be as fast as possible. However, many critical parts that must be ultrasonically inspected are curved. Thus, the objective of the development effort described here was to implement a cost-effective solution for automatically scanning complex curved parts