In-situ weld quality inspection with matrix phased array (MPA) ultrasonic technology

In the Oil and Gas industry, it is very common to make welds on pipes in the field. For straight pipes, most of the time, welds are inspected with an automated ultrasonic testing (AUT) system. However, pipes having non-traditional geometric constraints such as a slanted corrugation feature prohibit the use of an AUT method. As an effort to develop a field deployable in-situ weld inspection system, a high-speed MPA circuit board (purchased from Advanced OEM Solutions) has been used to drive a 32-element MPA probe operating at 3 MHz. The goal of the most recent phase of this development was to achieve a minimum of 200 inches per minute real-time inspection speed to match a welding process developed simultaneously at EWI. In order to meet the speed requirement, it was necessary to maximize the data acquisition rate as close as possible to the data transfer rate the MPA circuit board could support. A customized ultrasonic imaging algorithm developed using the Python programming language proved to be effective enough to achieve a maximum of 220 inches per minute inspection speed. In this paper, detailed discussions on the development of imaging algorithm and the results of real-time imaging inspection performed on a test specimen are presented.