Investigation into Ultrasonic Testing of Thick Walled Austenitic Welds

The ultrasonic testing(UT) of austenitic welds is difficult because they are not only anisotropic material in terms of elastic properties but heterogeneous material in terms of microstructure properties. The ultrasound wave in the austenitic weld is skewed along with crystallographic directions and scattered at weld boundaries. Since past decade, several tools for simulation of the wave propagation in highly anisotropic materials have been developed. In this paper, ray tracing and elastodynamic finite integration technique(EFIT) are applied to thick walled austenitic welds containing intergranular stress corrosion cracks(IGSCC) based on conventional UT method. It is demonstrated that the application of the ray tracing combined with EFIT shown in this paper can facilitate the selection of UT parameters.