A COMPARISON BETWEEN ASTM E588 AND SEP 1927 RELATING RESOLUTION LIMITS AT DETERMINATION OF THE PURITY GRADE

摘要

With increased usage of highly demanded, modern materials on safety relevant parts (e.g. railway wheel sets, generator shafts, turbine disks, medical implants, etc.) comprehensive analyses regarding the quality of the material are requested. This gives a focus to non-destructive methods using ultrasound immersion tank testing for classifying the degree of purity. Two autonomous standards, ASTM E588 and SEP 1927, have been established for the definition, execution and evaluation for this high resolution ultrasonic measurements on steel products. The propagation of ultrasonic waves and the resulting sound field are strongly dependent on the acoustical properties of the inspected material and the geometry of probes and specimen. The definition of the measurement setup and the evaluation methods appear to differ significantly in the given standards. ASTM E588 and SEP 1927 prescribe the requirement for surface roughness and probe selection, are using threshold based methods for cleanliness detection, but differ in computation for the degree of purity. This has been the motivation for a comparison between both standards with the main focus on amplitude depth dependency and overall spatial resolution taking the influence of different material characteristics, geometry of the specimen and sound fields into account. A performance comparison between the use of non-focusing and focusing probes respective to the threshold based detection will be presented in this contribution. In addition, the usage of complex reconstruction algorithms (e.g. SAFT, echo tomography) is compared with the traditional approaches of inclusion detection and estimation of the degree of purity.