Ultrasonic inspection of liquid metal filled austenitic stainless steel piping welds

The tests demonstrating the equipment and techniques for remote ultrasonic inservice examination of high temperature sodium filled austenitic stainless steel weldments indicated that there remained only system engineering design problems. A preservice data archiving and inservice data comparison technique has been demonstrated as a viable technique for objectively detecting changes in the presence of static background noise. In addition to improved near-real-time and off-line analysis techniques which have been demonstrated, objective raw data archiving permits emerging and future analytical techniques to be applied to data derived from previous examinations (preservice), as well as any subsequent examinations of the same volume