Nondestructive evaluation of stress corrosion cracking in a welded steel plate using guided ultrasonic waves

Stress corrosion cracking (SCC) had occurred in early generation high level nuclear waste tanks constructed by welding carbon steel. This paper describes an ultrasonic inspection system and its fundamental ability to detect and quantify the length of SCC on thick welded steel plates. Finite element method (FEM) was applied to simulate the welding process to estimate the welding residual stress field. Growth of stress corrosion cracks are driven by crack stress intensities exceeding the subcritical cracking threshold intensity. The subject plate was experimentally inspected with ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation (NDE) techniques to characterize the extent of SCC. The NDE system employs a piezoelectric transducer to generate guided waves in the thick steel plate, and a scanning laser Doppler vibrometer (SLDV) to measure multidimensional time-space wavefield data over a user-defined scanning area in the plate surface. The measured wavefield data can show wave interactions in a localized area in the plate due to the presence of the discontinuities of the SCC. To generate an inspection image that can precisely show the crack's location and/or the dimension, the wavefield data are further processed to generate inspection image that maps the entire sample plate so the crack can be clearly identified in the plate while its length can be readily estimated. The ultrasonic test results for crack length agree well with the visually estimated length, and are close to that predicted by FEM for cracks in the weld residual stress field.