Advances in TecView® UT: Enhanced Automated Ultrasonic Testing for Complex Curvilinear Structures

Advanced automated Ultrasonic Testing in production environments requires a high degree of precision and repeatability and the ability to safely scan complex parts, all while optimizing computer or software control resources which include scanning time and acquired data size. TecScan’s TecView® UT software includes a Curvilinear Surface Scan tool that gives the user the ability to precisely define scan boundaries that determine the surface to be scanned by the system. This tool proves to be very effective in situations where an area of a part must be avoided by the scanner, to avoid collision or to avoid a hole in contact scanning, or to reduce scanning times by outlining the part’s shape.

In the case of a part that has a protrusion that would collide with the probe during a scan, the operator can define an outline to avoid a collision, then the system will optimize the scanning paths to exclude the outlined area.

Test block and obstacle block

Water immersed blocks

As shown in the images above, an obstacle was intentionally placed on a test bloc as an example; an immersion ultrasonic rectangular raster scan of the test bloc at the above selected water path would result in a scanner collision. The developed curvilinear tool gives more flexibility to the user as to the choice of a probe with regards to the frequency and focal length, as they would not be restricted to scanning from afar to avoid scanner collisions with the tested sample.

TECVIEW® Curvilinear scan setup and C-Scan results

Curvilinear Surface Scan can optimize scanning times and file sizes by cutting out the unnecessary areas from the scanning procedure. In the following example, the scan time and the file size were cut down by 30% by not scanning the area outside of the part (black areas).TecView® Curvilinear Scan setup and C-Scan results

In a production setting, a Curvilinear Surface can be defined one time, then the operators can set up the parts and launch the automated scans.

Considering the aforementioned points, Curvilinear Surface Scanning in TecView® UT is a powerful tool that optimizes resources while broadening the scanning capabilities of users for complex parts inspection.