Integrated Ultrasonic Imaging for Inspection of Near-Surface Defects in Safety-Critical Components

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The project aims to bring a step change improvement to the sensitivity of ultrasonic array imaging for Non Destructive Evaluation (NDE) to address the needs of the power generation industry. This will be based on the processing of the Full Matrix Capture (FMC) set of signals between all pairs of transducer elements, as is already established for state-of-the-art Beam-Forming (BF) imaging, but the approach for treating the signals will be entirely different. Instead of calculating a direct image from the FMC measurements, an inverse scattering approach will be pursued: this will involve iterations of unknowns in an integrated forward model of the array configuration, material properties and geometry, to find a best match to the measured signals. This approach has been shown to overcome conventional BF limitations in the context of the imaging of biological tissues, achieving intensified sensitivity and sub-wavelength resolution. This project will develop the concept for NDE, employing a specific, but commonly encountered, critical inspection task as a realistic example to focus the work. The proposal is being submitted within the UK Research Centre in NDE (RCNDE) to its targeted research programme. The proposal has been reviewed internally by the RCNDE, approved by the RCNDE board, and supported financially by two RCNDE industrial members.