Ultrasonic Testing

What Is Ultrasonic Testing?

Ultrasonic Testing is a non-destructive testing method that makes use of short wavelength sound waves of both high and low frequency to detect internal flaws and defects within components and parts. Additionally, it can be used to determine a material’s thickness. For example, the thickness of the wall of a pipe.

What Ultrasonic Testing Is Used For?

Ultrasonic Testing is used to test for internal defects and flaws in castings, welds, tubes, pipes and composite materials in a wide range of industry sectors. Ultrasonic Testing is used to detect flaws such as inclusions, cracks and porosity. It is especially useful at detecting small flaws or defects that are located deep within a part.

Ultrasonic Testing is also used to assess the integrity of a bond between two materials. The benefits of this NDT method is that it provides quick and accurate results and is very portable, making it especially useful for on-site testing and inspection.

Ultrasonic Weld testing

By making use of angled transducers we are able to inspect any welds of a test object. Sound waves are sent into both the parent material as well as the weld volume. This generates geometric responses from the cap and root regions of the weld, which allows us to look for deviations in these signals.

Measuring Material Thickness

Ultrasonic Testing can also be used to measure material thickness. Sound waves travel at different velocities within different materials. By knowing the material velocity and the time it takes for a sound wave to travel from the transducer through the material and back again our expert inspectors can calculate the thickness of the material.

How Ultrasonic Testing Works

The technique of Ultrasonic Testing makes use of a pulser/receiver unit to power an ultrasonic transducer. This transducer is placed in contact with the material or component that is being tested and generates pulsed sound waves into the object.

The reflected sound waves or echos are received back by the transducer and any internal discontinuities will cause the signals to be displayed on the display unit. Our skilled investigators will then interpret these signals to determine if there are any flaws or defects present in the material.

Ultrasonic Testing provides a high degree of accuracy when determining the size and shape of any flaws or defects. This testing method also has the ability to locate sub-surface defects and provides far better depth penetration than other non-destructive testing methods.