This book deals with a number of fundamental issues related to the practical implementation of ultrasonic NDT techniques in an industrial environment. The book discusses advanced academic research results and their application to industrial procedures. The text covers the choice and generation of the signals energizing the system to probe position optimization, from quality assessment evaluation to tomographic inversion. With a focus to deepen a number of fundamental aspects involved in the specific objective of designing and developing an ultrasonic imaging system for nondestructive testing, aimed to automatically classify the entire production of an industrial production line, targeted to the field of precision mechanics. The contents of this book is the result of the common effort of six University Research Groups that focused their research activities for two years on this specific objective, working in direct conjunction with primary industrial firms, in a research project funded by the Italian government as a Strategic Research Project.

Materials Characterization Using Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) Methods discusses NDT methods and how they are highly desirable for both long-term monitoring and short-term assessment of materials, providing crucial early warning that the fatigue life of a material has elapsed, thus helping to prevent service failures. Materials Characterization Using Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) Methods gives an overview of established and new NDT techniques for the characterization of materials, with a focus on materials used in the automotive, aerospace, power plants, and infrastructure construction industries. Each chapter focuses on a different NDT technique and indicates the potential of the method by selected examples of applications. Methods covered include scanning and transmission electron microscopy, X-ray microtomography and diffraction, ultrasonic, electromagnetic, microwave, and hybrid techniques. The authors review both the determination of microstructure properties, including phase content and grain size, and the determination of mechanical properties, such as hardness, toughness, yield strength, texture, and residual stress. Gives an overview of established and new NDT techniques, including scanning and transmission electron microscopy, X-ray microtomography and diffraction, ultrasonic, electromagnetic, microwave, and hybrid techniques Reviews the determination of microstructural and mechanical properties Focuses on materials used in the automotive, aerospace, power plants, and infrastructure construction industries Serves as a highly desirable resource for both long-term monitoring and short-term assessment of materials

Ultrasonic methods have been very popular in nondestructive testing and characterization of materials. This book deals with both industrial ultrasound and medical ultrasound. The advantages of ultrasound include flexibility, low cost, in-line operation, and providing data in both signal and image formats for further analysis. The book devotes 11 chapters to ultrasonic methods. However, ultrasonic methods can be much less effective with some applications. So the book also has 14 chapters catering to other or advanced methods for nondestructive testing or material characterization. Topics like structural health monitoring, Terahertz methods, X-ray and thermography methods are presented. Besides different sensors for nondestructive testing, the book places much emphasis on signal/image processing and pattern recognition of the signals acquired.

Ultrasonic evaluation technologies have made considerable advancements throughout time. The research work presented in this dissertation aims to apply the well-studied ultrasound wave propagation properties with novel data processing frameworks to enhance the robustness and performance of ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation systems, namely rail inspection technologies. First, an ultrasonic non-contact rail defect detection prototype exploiting the properties of guided surface waves is presented. The system uses air-coupled transducers to generate and detect the surface waves. Because of the challenges (mainly low SNR) in this application of air-coupled transducers, numerical simulations results aided in the prototype hardware and software developments. This system utilizes a multivariate outlier classifier framework to distinguish a defective rail from a healthy rail. The statistical outlier analysis algorithm takes advantage of an adaptive baseline that allows for a higher rate of true detection, while minimizing false positives. A field test was conducted last October 2014 at the Transportation Technology Center in Colorado, proving the effectiveness of the rail defect detection prototype. Next, an initial internal flaw 3D imaging prototype utilizing advanced synthetic aperture focusing (SAF) frameworks is proposed. In this dissertation, the mode structure of the longitudinal and shear reflected waves are explored and considered as adaptive weights in existing SAF frameworks to increase the gain of the ultrasonic array without physically increasing its number of elements. In addition, a novel set of Global Matched Coefficients (GMC) is implemented to further decrease unwanted noise and artifacts in the images. Results from these new additions are presented, and their applications to rail defect imaging is proposed. The proposed defect imaging prototype reconstructs a 3D volumetric image from multiple planar ultrasonic images. An early defect rail defect imaging prototype is development and preliminary results are presented. The results show that the system is of high potential to be an advancement in solids internal defect imaging, particularly rail flaw characterization.

Most books on ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation (NDE) focus either on its theoretical background or on advanced applications. Furthermore, information on the most current applications, such as guided wave techniques and acoustic microscopy, is scattered throughout various conference proceedings and journals. No one book has integrated these aspe