FSW: PAUT-TOFD System
Inspection of Friction Stir Welds by Phased Array Ultrasonic Testing and Time of Flight Diffraction
AluStir offers an industrially proven, automatic ultrasonic inspection system combining Phased Array Ultrasonic Testing (PAUT) and Time of Flight Diffraction (TOFD) of Friction stir welds.[1]
The Sonaflex FSW Systems uses a set of ultrasonic testing probes consisting two Phased Array probes (PA 1 and PA 2) with a total of 16 channels and eight angle beam transducers arranged in two groups for performing TOFD/ATOFD. ATOFD is an advanced variant of the classical TOFD method, which was developed due to its excellent performance for assessing friction stir welds.
Please contact us at AluStir, if you are interested in more details or a demonstration on your FSW workpieces.
Water is used to provide better coupling between the PAUD-TOFD transducers and the friction stir welded parts to be inspected. A clever system has been developed to dry off the wet workpieces.
Industrial Application
The PAUD-TOFD system was installed in a FSW machine operated by Sespel, a Russian company that gained so much expertise during the day-to-day application of friction stir welding in Cheboksary that Roscosmos called a group of Sespel's specialists to Samara in 2020 to implement friction stir welding to the Soyuz-5 launch vehicle and carry out the operations.[2]
How to Implement PAUD-TOFD for FSW?
Patents
- Andrej Kirikov, Dimitri Kirikov, Waldemar Dan and Andrey Smirnov: Method for testing metallic testing object i.e. steel plate, for manufacturing pipeline-tubes,
involves receiving response signals from area as reflection response, and detecting interference signal through correlation of response signals. Patent Nr. DE 10 2010 006 275 A1.
- Andrej Kirikov, Pavel Pashkov, Fedor Durnov and Alexey Smirnov: Device for testing electronic components having at least one embedded layer containing metal, method,
and use of an electromagnetic acoustic transducer. Patent No. WO2012104316A1 and Patent No. DE102011009915A1.
- Andrej Vasilevič Kirikov, Aleksandr Nikolaevič Zabrodin, Aleksej Michailovič Kašin and Konstantin Nikolaevič Makarenkov: Verfahren zum Erhöhen des Interferenzschutzes einer Ultraschallprüfung und eine Vorrichtung zum Ausführen des Verfahrens. Patent No DE 11 2006 003 795 T5.