| ABSTRACT: | AUTOMATIC, IN-LINE ULTRASONIC INSPECTION SYSTEM FOR BILLETS AND RODS
PRODUCTION
J. L. Garcia Alonso, J. A. Fernandez Plaza, A. Buitrago Carrillo, E. Garcia Ares
Interlab, Ingenieria Electronica, Madrid, Spain
Increasing demand of higher quality products, in addition to the demand of higher production rates, have
driven INTERLAB, Ingenieria Electronica, SA to develop a novel automatic ultrasonic equipment for steel
industries, aimed at the inspection of latent cracks that could have emerged during the manufacturing
process of billets and rods.
This equipment is able to examine pieces of variable size (diameters ranging from 20 to 300 mm), made of
0.10 Ð0.90 % C steels, with raw external surface or previously machined. Full coverage of the piece is
guaranteed since the transducers number is selected taking into account its beam-width to assure overlaping.
The inspection of the rods is carried out by six or eight pneumatically driven probe sub-assemblies,
employing water as a coupling agent. Both contact water film and water column, coupling are employed,
depending on the rod size.
In the case of the prismatic steel bars a different approach is applied: two specific probe sub-assemblies,
with eight specially arranged transducers each, inspect the total length of the piece employing a partial
immersion technique.
The equipment described in this proposal employs a modular advanced multi-channel system fully
developed by INTERLAB, Ingenieria Electronica, SA under the registered name ULTRASEN¨, for advance
ultrasound signal processing and flaw detection, and used in a wide variety of industrial inspection systems.
The inspection system, presented in this paper are actually under successful operating in the process lines of
SIDENOR (Reinosa, Spain) and Inoxidables OLARRA (Leio, Basque Country, Spain).
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