Detection of a surface breaking crack by using the centroid variations of laser ultrasonic spectrums

A laser ultrasonic system is a non-contact inspection device with a wide-band spectrum and a high spatial resolution. It provides absolute measurements of the moving distance and it can be applied to hard-to-access locations including curved or rough surfaces like in a nuclear power plant. In this paper, we have investigated the detection methods of the depth of a surface-breaking crack by using the surface wave of a laser ultrasound. The filtering function of a surface-breaking crack is a kind of a low-pass filter. The higher frequency components are more highly decreased in proportion to the crack depth. Also, the center frequency value of each ultrasound spectrum is decreased in proportion to the crack depth. We extracted the depth information of a surface-breaking crack by observing the centroid variation of the frequency spectrum. We describe the experimental results to detect the crack depth information by using the peak-to-valley values in the time domain and the center frequency values in the frequency domain.