A Laser-based Ultrasonic Inspection System to Detect Micro Fatigue Cracks

Laser-based ultrasonic techniques have been established as a viable non-contact alternative to piezoelectric transducers for generating and receiving ultrasound. Laser-based ultrasonic inspection system provides a number of advantages over the conventional generation by piezoelectric transducers, especially a non-contact generation and detection of ultrasonic waves, high spatial scanning resolution, controllable narrow-band and wide-band spectrum, absolute measurements of the moving distance, use of fiber optics, and an ability to operate on curved and rough surfaces and at hard-to-access locations like a nuclear power plant. Ochiai and Miura used the laser-based ultrasound to detect micro fatigue cracks for the inspection of a material degradation in nuclear power plants. This widely applicable laser-based ultrasonic inspection system is comparatively expensive and provides low signal-to-noise ratio to measure ultrasound by using the laser interferometer. Many studies have been carried out to improve the measuring efficiency of the laser interferometer. One of the widely used laser interferometer types to measure the ultrasound is the Confocal Fabry-Perot Interferometer(CFPI). The measurement gain of the CFPI is slightly and continually varied according to the small change of the cavity length and the fluctuations of the measuring laser beam frequency with time. If we continually adjust the voltage of a PZT which is fixed to one of the interferometer mirrors, the optimum working point of the CFPI can be fixed. Though a static stabilizer can fix the gain of the CFPI where the CW laser beam is targeted at one position, it can not be used when the CW laser beam is scanned like a scanning laser source(SLS) technique. A dynamic stabilizer can be used for the scanning ultrasonic inspection system. A robust dynamic stabilizer is needed for an application to the industrial inspection fields. Kromine showed that the SLS technique is effective to detect small fatigue cracks on the surface. We can detect small fatigue cracks by finding the abrupt changing of the amplitude of the ultrasound and its center frequency in the SLS technique. It means that the scanning laser beam is located in the vicinity of the cracks. In this paper, we developed a stable laser-based ultrasonic inspection system using a pulse laser, a CFPI with a dynamic stabilizer and a computer. The computer is equipped with a GHz high speed A/D converter, three A/D converters, one D/A converter and one digital output port. The configured dynamic stabilizer generates the laser-based ultrasound by triggering a pulse laser at the maximum gain time by continually observing the gain of the CFPI. The computer acquires the laser-based ultrasound by using the GHz high-speed A/D converter and processes the ultrasonic signal in real time. We experimentally confirmed that the developed laser-based ultrasonic inspection system is stable and can detect cracks using the SLS technique