High temperature ultrasonic measurements of plant and components for defect detection and monitoring

在许多情况下，部件和设备在高温下运行，如涡轮机、高温处理管道、发电锅炉和反应堆。目前，大多数无损检测（NDT）是在较低温度或环境温度下进行的，至少需要部分关闭过程。工厂的计划停机是昂贵的，但由于灾难性故障而导致的计划外停机的成本可能高达数百万英镑，并且可能对人员和公众的安全造成极其严重的后果。此外，一些核电站的某些区域即使在停电期间也极难进入，这意味着唯一可行的方法是使用永久安装的监控。我们提出的设备和概念，使高温监测和检查，目前是不可能的。这不仅受到工业需求的刺激，而且还受到对高温压电材料的知识和理解的重大进步的刺激，这些材料包括厚膜和薄膜形式，在高达800摄氏度的温度下工作。利用这些材料开发高温传感器的吸引力在于它们坚固耐用、价格低廉，并且可以永久安装在工厂上。在一个新的混合系统概念中，以前没有应用于高温检测，我们将把这些与改进的非接触式超声波产生技术结合起来。

There are many instances where components and plant operate at elevated temperatures such as turbines, high temperature processing pipework, power generation boilers and reactors. Currently, most non-destructive testing (NDT) is carried out at lower or ambient temperature, necessitating at least partial shut-down of the process. Planned outage of plant is costly but the cost of unplanned outage due to catastrophic failure can run to millions of pounds, and can have extremely serious consequences for the safety of personnel and the public. In addition, some plant contains areas that are extremely difficult to access even during an outage meaning that the only viable approach is to use permanently installed monitoring. We propose devices and concepts to enable high temperature monitoring and inspection where it is currently impossible. This is stimulated not only by the industrial imperative, but also by major advances in knowledge and understanding of high temperature piezoelectric materials, in thick film and thin film form, operating at temperatures up to 800C. The attraction in developing high temperature sensors from these materials is that they can be robust, inexpensive and permanently installed on plant. In a novel hybrid system concept, not previously applied to high temperature inspection, we will combine these with improved non-contact ultrasonic generation techniques.