Comparison between shear wave ultrasonic examination and radiographic examination of some austenitic stainless steel pipe welds

This paper compares the results of the ultrasonic and radiographic examinations of five austenitic pipe to pipe welds, which contained different types of intentional weld defects. Both the ultrasonic and radiographic examinations were made under laboratory conditions, and thus the results cannot directly be generalized to workshop examinations. The ultrasonic examination was performed using a conventional shear wave angle beam technique due to the geometric conditions of the welds. Longitudinal wave angle beam probes were not used in this work. Comparison between the results of the ultrasonic and radiographic examinations leads to the conclusion that neither method gives quite satisfactory results. Both methods missed some defects and the correlation between the results of the methods was not very good. In the ultrasonic examination the most difficult problem was the evaluation of the defects. (author)