Technical/Domain Paper Writing Competition (2016-2017)

Category of Entry:

Name of Employee: RAGHVENDRA SINGH

Employee Number: C456

Designation: SR. ENGINEER

Department: INSPECTION

Directorate: COMMERCIAL

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DEVELOPMENT OF LASER BASED ULTRASONICS NON

DESTRUCTIVE TESTING
Abstract

Non Destructive evaluation (NDE), in particular ultrasonic technique, is an obvious

choice for inspection in materials to detect macroscopic defects in structures due to its
low cost and high reliability. Although piezoelectric transducers are commonly used for
non destructive testing, several problems are associated with the requirement that they
are bonded to the test material with an acoustical impedance matching coupling medium.
Laser beam ultrasound generation and detection overcomes all of the problems affords
the opportunity to make truly non contact ultrasonic measurements in both electrically
conducting and non conducting materials, in materials at elevated temperatures, in
corrosive environment and other hostile environments, in geometrically difficult to reach
locations, and do all of this at relatively large distances, i.e. meters, from the test object
surface. Having small and adjustable footprint with high frequency capability of detecting
very small flaws.
Laser based Ultrasonic Testing is fast and effective on rough surfaces. It can function
effectively in a factory environment. It is ideally suited for many applications that are
beyond the capabilities of conventional ultrasonic testing.
This paper gives a broad overview of laser- ultrasonics, which is a technique for non
contact generation and detection of ultrasound is presented & applications that has
been transitioned to the industry are presented as well as many other potential
applications.

INTRODUCTION

Ultrasonic techniques are widely used in industry for thickness gauging, flaw detection
and material characterization [1]. The ultrasonic waves are usually generated and
detected by piezoelectric transducers and coupled to the inspected part either by direct
contact or through a water bath or a water jet. Although widespread and generally cost
effective, these conventional ultrasonic techniques suffer from essentially two severe
limitations, which impact upon their use for online process control and the inspection of
advanced materials.
First, testing parts at elevated temperature is difficult and often impossible. The use of
buffer rods, cooling systems or momentary contact is not general, since it can hardly be
applied on fast and hot moving products, as often encountered in the steel industry.
Electromagnetic transducers (EMATs) which have been developed many years ago to
solve this coupling problem require close proximity to the part( in mm range). This
makes it difficult, for instance to parts moving on a conveyor, since transverse motion of
the parts makes the distance between the transducer and the surface to vary widely.
Secondly, piezoelectric transduction of ultrasound requires proper orientation of the

transducer with respect to the surface when the transducer is used in the pulse echo
mode, which is of the most interest since it requires single sided access and provides
flaw depth information. This valuable information cannot be obtained from a
transmission mode with emitting and receiving transducers located on the opposite
sides of the inspected part. Precise orientation requirements follow from the fact that the
transducer is a phase sensitive device that emits or receives from its whole surface.
Angular tolerance is about a few degrees or much less if the amplitude of the ultrasonic
echoes has to be precisely monitored. Consequently the inspection of the curved or
contoured parts require a surface contour following device , which will be very complex
and difficult to implement, especially in the case of acute discontinuities of the surface.
Such a device necessarily based on robotics and mechanics is also likely to have
limitations in scanning speed, wear and maintenance.
These limitations are eliminated by Laser Ultrasonics that uses lasers for the generation
and detection of the Ultrasound [2,3]. In laser ultrasonics, transduction of ultrasound is
performed at a distance, which in practice can range from inches to several feet and
therefore, eliminates the difficulties encountered by conventional ultrasonics for probing
parts at elevated temperature. In Laser Ultrasonics a source of ultrasound is located
at the surface of the material and detection of the ultrasonic motion is performed off the
same surface, which eliminates the normalcy requirement of conventional ultrasonics.
Another feature, which has actually an impediment, is the complexity of the Laser
ultrasonic transducer, which is sketched in Fig 1. As shown in Fig 1, such as
transducer has typically 3 basic elements generation laser, a detection laser and an
interferometer, followed by data acquisition and processing electronic hardware. Ins
spite of this complexity, such a transducer can be made very reliable for the use in
severe industrial environments and it also can be made very cost effective for a number
of applications. Two applications that have been transitioned from laboratory to the plant
floor are presented below. An extensive collection of references for the topics presented
in this paper can be found in[4]. Basics of generation and detection developed before
1990 can also be found in [3].

Fig. 1. Sketch of the principle of laser-ultrasonics

Laser Generation of Ultrasound

There are essentially two kinds of mechanisms for generating ultrasound, the first one is
perfectly non destructive and is based on thermoelastic mechanism while the second
one is invasive and is based on the ablation of the same or on the vaporization of some
surface layer. The principle of the thermoelastic generation is the following: Laser light
is absorbed to some depth inside the material releasing the heat locally; the heated
region then expands producing a strain and a corresponding stress that is source of
waves propagating in the material or at its surface. When light penetration is small and
the excitation spot much less than an acoustic wavelength, a complex emission pattern
is observed in the far field with inclined lobes (30 to 60 deg) for longitudinal and shear
waves. There is particular no longitudinal emission along the normal of the surface. In
order to reproduce the conditions of conventional piezoelectric transducers, the source
should have a larger extent and there should have some light penetration below the
surface. Light penetration is very important in practice since its gives a piston source at
the surface of the material emitting normally propagating longitudinal waves,
independently of the surface curvature and of the orientation of the laser beam. This is
at the basis of the inspection of polymer-matrix composites, which is one of the
industrial applications of laser ultrasonics.

Figure 2: Laser generation of ultrasound in ablation mode

Figure 3: Laser generation of ultrasound in thermo-elastic mode

Surface waves and plate waves can also be generated efficiently and in a very versatile
manner. When the laser beam is focused to a small circular spot, a surface wave with a
cylindrical symmetry is emitted from this spot. Good directivity is obtained by focusing
the beam with a cylindrical lens to get a line source. More complicated patterns can
even be used, such as an array of lines, giving narrower band emission but having the

advantage to distribute the laser energy over a broader area so surface damage can be
avoided. A converging circular Rayleigh surface wave giving very strong displacement
at the center of convergence can be readily obtained by using, in addition to the
conventional spherical lens, an axicon (conical lens). Enhancement techniques have
been developed by sweeping the line or line array source with a proper velocity. If one
increases the energy density, particularly for small light penetration (metals), one
reaches the threshold where the surface starts to melt and then to get vaporized. At this
point, matter is ejected from the surface and through various physical processes this
vapor and the surrounding air is ionized, thus producing a plasma plume that expands
away from the laser spot on the surface. Generation of ultrasound originates from the
initial recoil produced by the material ablation and from the plasma pressure. A similar
vaporization effect occurs also when the material is covered by a thin absorbing layer,
which is blown off, leaving the substrate underneath substantially unaffected if the
energy density is below some threshold. In the strong plasma regime on the other hand,
a crater mark is left on the surface.

Independently of the mechanism used, it should be recognized that the material is

actually the emitting transducer of ultrasound. This distinguishes laser-ultrasonics from
piezoelectric-based conventional ultrasonics in which the source of ultrasound is a
piezoelectric element separated from the tested material.

Laser Detection of Ultrasound

To detect ultrasound, the surface is illuminated by a laser beam, continuous or of pulse

duration sufficiently long to capture all the ultrasonic signal of interest.

Scattered or reflected light is then collected by an optical receiver, which is in the case
of most industrial applications an interferometer (see Fig. 4).

Figure 4. Principle of optical detection of ultrasound with an interferometer (here

sketched as a confocal Fabry-Perot)

A practical interferometer, which is by now widely used, is the confocal Fabry-Perot.

This is a simple system made of two concave identical mirrors separated by a distance
equal to their radius of curvature. In excellent approximation each ray retraces its path
after multiple reflections in the resonator, which gives to the system high collection
efficiency (etendue or throughput). It can be used in transmission or in reflection. In
transmission the responsivity peaks at a frequency equal to about a resonance width.
The reflection scheme has on the other hand nearly flat frequency response above this
frequency, except for periodic drops at integer of the free spectral range. It should be
noted that the responsivity is practically zero at very low frequencies, which means that
this system is intrinsically insensitive to vibrations, a key advantage for use in industrial
environments. The main weakness of Fabry-Perot demodulators is their lack of
sensitivity at low ultrasonic frequencies (below 2 MHz), which is circumvented by
devices based on two-wave mixing in photorefractive materials.

Figure 5. Demodulation with a two-wave mixing photorefractive interferometer.

Digital signal processing

Laser-ultrasonics, like any other ultrasonic technique could benefit advantageously of

digital signal processing to increase sensitivity. Operations such as averaging, adaptive
filtering could be used as well as more advanced methods such as split-spectrum
processing or wavelet denoising.

Regarding imaging, a numerical imaging approach such as the one based on the
Synthetic Aperture Focusing Technique (SAFT) can be combined with laser-ultrasonics
to obtain high quality images. Processing can be done in the time domain but since this
is can be very computation intensive and fairly long, methods that operate in Fourier
space and make use of Fast Fourier Transform algorithms have been developed [5].
These methods, significantly different from the conventional time SAFT, although
sometimes called F-SAFT, are based on a plane wave decomposition of the acoustic
field for each frequency combined with a back-propagation algorithm. This processing
technique has been applied in particular to the imaging of stress corrosion cracks in
steel. One example of the results obtained is shown in Fig. 6 where the crack opening

image of stress corrosion cracks in a stainless steel test sample is compared with the
image obtained conventionally by liquid penetrants. The laser-ultrasonic image was
obtained by scanning the opposite surface and applying an F-SAFT reconstruction
algorithm using the laser generated shear waves.

Figure 6. Comparison of crack opening images obtained by liquid penetrants (left) and
laser-ultrasonic F-SAFT processing using shear waves and an annular aperture (right).

Industrial Applications:

Application to Polymer Matrix Composite Inspection

Polymer Matrix Composite materials( such as graphiteepoxy) are now widely used,
particularly in the aeronautic industry, to make various parts which would be large
panels( such as doors/sections of the wing of the aircraft) or have a complex contours.
Laser Ultrasonics offers an attractive and even unique method of inspection of these
materials. Same presented below the examples that will illustrate the application to the
inspection of parts of the large area and to the contoured parts.[6]

Inspection of Composite Parts of large Areas

The system operates at a distance of - 1.5 m between the surface and the optical
scanner. It allows us to scan from a fixed system position an area of - 1.8 m x 1.8 m and
even a larger area depending upon the scattering properties of the surface. We present
as example in Fig. 7 the time-of-flight C-scan of a test panel 1 m x 2 m. This panel is
slightly curved, has stiffeners on its back surface and has a complicated thickness
profile (see side sketch). This test panel is representative of an actual part of the wing of
an aircraft.

Fig. 7. Laser-ultrasonic time-of-flight C-scan of a composite panel 1 m x 2 m.

It is made of graphite-epoxy covered by a metallic mesh for protection against lightning,
primer coating and top paint coating. As shown in Fig. 7, the laser-ultrasonic
scan reveals the complex thickness profile of the panel plus other features and agrees
well with scan made by conventional ultrasonic techniques.

Inspection of Contoured Parts

An example of a contoured part that has been inspected is sketched in Fig. 8a. This part
is a C-channel made of a graphite epoxy fabric. This sample is made of 6
plies(thickness - 2.5 mm - 0.1 "), plus 4 additional plies on surface. It has several
implanted flaws and is not painted. Although it was scanned successfully over its whole
surface, we are only showing here in Fig. 8.b the time-of-flight C-scan and a B-scan of
one corner. This corner runs through the increased thickness area and has two
implanted flaws, including one just above the bottom ply. The time-of-flight C-scan
shows the varying thickness and the presence of the flaws in the comer. The exact
locations of the flaws are clearly indicated by the B-scan. Note also that the individual
plies are resolved in this B-scan.

Fig. 8a. Schematic of the C-channel inspected by laser-ultrasonics. The area

encircled by a dash line corresponds to the scans shown in Fig. 8b.

Fig.8.b. Time-of-flight C-scan (at top) and B-scan (below) of the area of the channel
encircled by a dash line in Fig. 8 a.

Application in Steel Industry and to online Thickness Gauging

As previously mentioned, laser-ultrasonics eliminates the limitations of classical

ultrasonics encountered when the inspected product is at elevated temperature and
moving on a conveyor. Many applications are consequently foreseen in metal producing
industries and in particular, in the steel industry. To name a few, let us mention the
measurement of thickness, the determination of grain size, the evaluation of anisotropy
and texture, the detection of flaws, the monitoring of the solid liquid interface, the
detection of phase transitions such the austenite to ferrite, the measurement of internal

temperature, the evaluation of the cleanliness of a molten metal... This has been
explored several of these potential applications in the laboratory [6-10]. Using these
tests the wall thickness of seamless tubes at - 1000C , moving on a conveyor after hot
piercing and stretching was measured on-line and in real time.
Since the system has to operate in a severe industrial environment, it was made of
essentially two units, an environment controlled cabin and a measuring head on top of
the line linked by an umbilical cord containing optical fibers for transmission of the
generation and detection laser beams and for bringing the scattered light to the
interferometer. The cabin houses the lasers, the confocal Fabry-Perot interferometer,
control electronics, processing and display data computers. This system also includes a
fiber-coupled pyrometer to measure tube temperature and a fiber-coupled coordinate
measuring system to determine the measuring locations on the passing tube in rotation
and to provide full thickness mapping. A picture of the measuring head on top of the line
and above a passing tube is shown in Fig. 9. It was also found that the system could
provide more than thickness information such as a measurement of the austenitic grain
size by proper analysis of ultrasonic attenuation [11].

Figure 9 View of the inspection head located on-line measuring a tube being processed.

Figure 10. Laser-ultrasonic metallography.

Fig 11 Schematic Drawing for Measurement Configuration

Fig 12 photo of Pipe exiting the mill during measurement

Fig 13 Measurement after correction of Thermal expansion

Other Potential Industrial Applications

Many other applications are potential for industrial use and are at various stages of
development. Among those, the application to the characterization of hot metals during
processing comes first. As noted above with respect to the laser-ultrasonic tube
thickness gauge, laser-ultrasonics could be used to measure the grain size of steel in
the austenitic phase. Fig. 10 shows an example of this laser-ultrasonics
metallography, in which grain size determined by analysis of ultrasonic attenuation and
grain size measured by conventional metallography after quenching are compared. This
data was obtained by heating the steel sample in a Gleeble thermal simulator [12].
Other potential industrial applications of laser-ultrasonics include the detection of
degradation of metallic structures, such as fatigue cracking, stress corrosion cracking
and corrosion thinning in airframes ,same technique can be used in service inspection

of Nuclear reactor components & pipeline industry .[13,14] There is also definite
potential for measuring on-line the mechanical properties of a paper web and its
tension. The detection of defects at a smaller scale (e.g. chips) has also been explored
and is an application well adapted to laser-ultrasonics by the capability of the technique
to provide high frequency ultrasonic testing without water coupling.

Conclusion

I have presented an overview of the basics and of the various technological aspects of
laser-ultrasonics. Have outlined the various principles and discussed the phenomena
involved in laser generation and detection. Also presented the advantages and
drawbacks of this technique, particularly in comparison with conventional piezoelectricbased ultrasonics. Several of those are linked to the basic characteristic of laserultrasonics, which is the use of light as a means for ultrasound emission and detection.
Light allows ultrasonic testing without contact and at a distance, thus making possible a
wide range of high temperature applications, but sensitivity is on the other hand
dependent upon the number of detected photons, which in turn could require a special
high power laser for detection. Many advantages and drawbacks of laser-ultrasonics are
also linked to the fact that the material is actually the emitting transducer. This
distinguishing feature allows probing more easily parts with complex shapes but may
lead to several limitations depending upon the material, such as very weak emission or
material damage. Detection interferometers well adapted to industrial applications have
also been described, including the confocal Fabry-Perot and the two-wave mixing
photorefractive interferometer, which is expected to find a broader use, displacing the
confocal Fabry-Perot.
A third feature of laser-ultrasonics that has been noted is the complexity of the
technique that includes usually two lasers and a detection interferometer. This makes it
generally a high cost , but in spite of that, it turns out to be cost effective for several
applications and we have described the application to the inspection of polymer
composites and to wall thickness measurement of hot steel tubes .Other potential
applications that are at various stages of advancement have also been outlined. In spite
of the successes, which show that this technology has really a practical impact and is
not simply a laboratory curiosity.

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