About
Recent years were marked by the intense interest in finding ways to extend the service life of generation II and generation III reactors. NDT of the critical sections, including complex welds, is a cornerstone of any such effort. In line with this challenge, the H2020 project ADVISE (2017-2020) developed and demonstrated several methods for accounting for the microstructure in inspections, making a step advance in the field. As an example, Figure 3 shows the result of adaptive imaging conceived by ADVISE – the improvement in the SNR and defect location is game-changing. Among the outcomes of ADVISE, the present consortium proposed imaging algorithms that take the grain orientation map of the observation zone into account, determine material-corrected delays, and compute more precise images; this relies on the knowledge of grain orientations across the weld. Project partners agreed that these methods could enrich NDT practice in a broader industrial context and identified the following techniques developed in ADVISE, which can determine the grain orientation map or account for the expected uncertainty in weld parameters:
- optimisation of the total focusing method (TFM) image by adjusting given weld model parameters to maximise the amplitude of the image around a suspected defect,
- ray inversion independently updating local orientations to match measured times-of-flight across an array.
The most promising vehicle to bring these solutions to a broader market is a new, more general weld description proposed in iWeld. The ADVISE project pursued multiple research avenues, including the formation of welds, wave propagation, characterisation and inspection. As a result, it fostered the development of a significantly more profound understanding of the nature of the inspection challenges than any other international study to date. The industrial partners driving the consortium identified the techniques with the most promising potential for delivering improved inspection in practice. The generic nature of this new understanding and the outcomes of the ADVISE project make them applicable beyond the nuclear context. iWeld opens up the possibility of capitalising on this newly acquired knowledge and implementing the developments which will broaden the market potential for intelligent inspections, benefitting, in turn, the nuclear industry.