The heat exchanger, which transfers heat from one medium to another, is widely used in power plant industry. Its condenser consists of a large number of tubes that are manufactured very thin so as to increase the heat exchange efficiency. Because of ...
The heat exchanger, which transfers heat from one medium to another, is widely used in power plant industry. Its condenser consists of a large number of tubes that are manufactured very thin so as to increase the heat exchange efficiency. Because of their thinness, however, they can be easily destroyed when a defect occurs. Therefore, non-destructive testing is periodically performed to detect and remove any such damages (from it) and maintain it at its optimal state.
To detect defects in a heat exchanger tube, currently, the Eddy Current Testing (ECT) is mainly used which involves a leak test and then an a point by point inspection. The problem, however, is that this conventional method can hardly detect the defects that are intensively found in the expansion zone, in which residual stress and fluid flow tends to concentrate, and in the region of the tube support plate and bend as well. The ECT, relying on changes in impedance, should be sensitive to unwanted material properties and shape as well as to the target defects. It is often too heavily influenced by the material of the tube support plate, to detect the defect signals optimally; it tends to take too long and to have difficulties in testing the inlet and outlet areas due to the shape of the sensor.
To overcome these limitations, a non-contact ultrasonic guided wave technique using the electro-magnetic acoustic sensors(EASs) was applied. The proposed method is a non-contact NDE technique using the ultrasonic wave generated by Lorentz and magnetostrictive forces. In addition, a signal process technique has been developed to analyze the characterization of defects. Expecially, the technique analyzes the frequency dependence of the defects and effectively avoids the problem related to the conventional guided ultrasonic wave method that depended on the reflected signal.
In order to improve performance verification, two types of EASs have been designed and fabricated to better analyze the signal characteristics of the guided waves from the sensor in the heat exchanger tube. Its applicability to nondestructive evaluation has been tested by applying it to tubes with artificial defects to evaluate its detectability and to size its performance. First, it is shown that the EASs can transmit and receive the mode selectively. The sine wave synthesis and time-frequency analysis methods have shown that it can identify defect signals from false signals from the tube support plate. Based on these results, the dissertation claims that the new EAS-based technique will constitute a much more efficient and reliable method in nondestructive evaluation.