Ultrasonic non destructive testing on aluminium forged bars

In the field of Ultrasonic Non Destructive Testing (US-NDT) applied to the defect investigation of aluminum bar for aerospace application, a number of solutions based on different signals generation, conditioning and data processing were proposed in literature. In this paper, a performance analysis of the US-NDT is proposed with the aim to obtain a suitable combination of such solutions that allow the best defect detection capability. The analysis was experimentally performed on two aluminum bars with two different cracks: the former generated by a fatigue process and the latter caused by a corrosive process. The results obtained with reference to different types of excitation signal and various methods of analyzing the acquired data are detailed.