DISSIMILAR Demonstration day at the Pride Park Stadium, Derby
23/03/2011
Capucine Carpentier, TWI Ltd reportsA demonstration day for the ultrasonic inspection of austenitic dissimilar welds was held on the 25th of January 2011 in Pride Park Stadium, Derby. The event was organised by Peak NDT of Derby and was designed to frame the DISSIMILAR project. The project was funded by the Technology Strategy Board (UK) and work was carried out in collaboration with Shell UK, EDF Energy, HSE, Peak NDT, Applied Inspection, Alba Ultrasound, Birmingham University and TWI.
The event gathered 35 people from the power and oil & gas industries. This demonstration day provided an overview of the project final results and was an opportunity to discuss current and future methods and requirements for the inspection of austenitic dissimilar welds using ultrasonic phased arrays.
Will Daniels from Serco TCS introduced the morning session with a short talk on power industry perspective of dissimilar metal weld inspections. Channa Nageswaran of TWI followed with a presentation on the outcomes of the performance evaluation of phased array techniques against current best practice techniques. The session continued with presentations from Bruce Drinkwater from Bristol University, Capucine Carpentier from TWI and Gerry Harvey from PZFlex, who presented on advanced approaches to inspect austenitic dissimilar welds using FMC (full matrix capture), TFM (total focusing method), autofocus algorithms, ADL (adapted delay laws) and finite element analysis.
The afternoon went live with a demonstration from Alison Whittle of Peak NDT and Andrew Tweedie from Alba Ultrasound, who presented the latest development on the Micropulse PA and the array transducers that Alba Ultrasound designs and manufactures for NDE applications.
Delegates also got the opportunity to have a behind-the-scenes look at the black and white Pride Park Stadium and went away with guidelines generated for phased array ultrasonic inspection of dissimilar metal joints from the experience of the DISSIMILAR project.
www.dissimilarweld.co.uk
