Ultrasonic control of welded joints in a Du800-type pipeline. Part I: Restoring reflector images by digital focusing with an antenna

The reliability of ultrasonic nondestructive testing can be improved by acquiring reflector images that can be used to solve the defectometry problem, that is, to determine the type, size, and coordinates of a reflector deep in the sample. Welded pipelines with a diameter of 840 mm (Du800 type) are used at nuclear power facilities in Russia; ultrasonic testing of these pipelines is thus a topical problem. In model experiments, echo signals were registered by two antenna arrays, situated on the opposite sides of a welded joint (the N- and P-sides). The arrays performed scanning along and across the welded joint. The following techniques were used to reconstruct reflector images by the DFA method in a homogeneous isotropic medium: registering echo signals for all emission–reception combinations of elements in the two antenna arrays with the aim of merging partial images into a single image by different methods; reconstructing images on different acoustic schemes with allowance for wave-type transformation; and registering echo signals in a triple-scanning mode with subsequent coherent summation of partial images. It has been shown that the above techniques are insufficient for producing high-quality images.