As part of a multi-year program funded by the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (US NRC) to address nondestructive examination (NDE) reliability of inservice inspection (ISI) programs, studies conducted at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington, have focused on assessing novel NDE approaches for the inspection of coarse-grained, cast austenitic stainless steel reactor components. The primary objective of this work is to provide information to the US NRC on the utility, effectiveness and reliability of ultrasonic testing (UT) as related to the ISI of primary piping components in US commercial nuclear power plants. This paper describes progress, recent developments and results from an assessment of a portion of the work relating to the ultrasonic low frequency phased array inspection technique. Westinghouse Owner’s Group (WOG) cast stainless steel pipe segments with thermal and mechanical fatigue cracks, PNNL samples containing thermal fatigue cracks and several blank vintage specimens having very coarse grains that are representative of early centrifugally cast piping installed in PWRs, were used for assessing the inspection method. The phased array approach was implemented using an R/D Tech Tomoscan III system operating at 1.0 MHz and 500 kHz, providing composite volumetric images of the samples. Several dual, transmit-receive, custom designed low-frequency arrays were employed in laboratory trials. Results from laboratory studies for assessing detection and localization are discussed.
Multi-mode nonlinear ultrasonic phased array for closed crack imaging