Ultrasonic NDT signal processing

Ultrasonic inspection is one of the most promising nondestructive testing methods applied during manufactoring, preservice and in-service inspection of components like pipes, vessels or steel plates. Starting from manual inspection the research and developments of the last years resulted in modern remote controlled and f-processor based ultrasonic inspection systems with a wide variety of implemented signal processing algorithms. In the following different data acquisition procedures, their data handling and image processing are described. Due to wide variety of technical realizations two methods are discussed in more detail : ALOK which is able to process ultrasonic data of the inspection of thick walled components in real time with analyzing capability for in-service inspection of nuclear power pressure vessels and SAFT featuring defect analysis by image reconstruction of ultrasonic wave data