This proposal is associated with the targeted research programme of the UK Research Centre for NDE (RCNDE), an EPSRC-supported research centre. It is clear from discussions held with both academics and industrial members within RCNDE that the ultrasonic inspection of highly scattering/attenuating materials is still a large problem that needs to be addressed. The particular materials in question - such as thermal insulation materials, refractory linings, rubbers and thick sections of glass fibre reinforced polymer composites - are industrially very important. In many cases, there are not many alternatives for inspection, in particular if portability and non-radiological methods are required. The research will investigate new ways in which ultrasonic frequencies below 1 MHz can be applied to this problem. This will require research into various aspects of the measurement. Firstly, new transducer designs will be needed, that can generate signals with the required bandwidth. It is planned to try micro fibre composite (MFC) devices for this, teamed up with more conventional PZT elements. These will then be used with various forms of coded waveform, so that cross-correlation can enhance the measurement in terms of detectability and reduced signal to noise levels. In addition, scattering from interfaces and non-defect objects casue clutter in the signal. It is planned to investigate ways of reducing these effects, byusing other ideas such as (a) using a collimation system, and (b) using polarised shear waves. Finally, a system will be dseigned which uses some or all of these elements, and which can tuned to operate at different frequency ranges, depending on the application. The work will be performed in collaboration with three industrial sectors: marine vessel manufacture, the oil and gas industries, and metal forming. All have particular problems with methods of inspecting acoustically attenuating and scattering material. These include coatings and thick composites; thermal insulation layers, corrosion under insulation, and risers; refractory materials, and others. As part of the work, the research will be used to design a portable system that can be used in these industries. This will be tested in the laboratory, before field tests are performed in each case.

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There are many instances where components and plant operate at elevated temperatures such as turbines, high temperature processing pipework, power generation boilers and reactors. Currently, most non-destructive testing (NDT) is carried out at lower or ambient temperature, necessitating at least partial shut-down of the process. Planned outage of plant is costly but the cost of unplanned outage due to catastrophic failure can run to millions of pounds, and can have extremely serious consequences for the safety of personnel and the public. In addition, some plant contains areas that are extremely difficult to access even during an outage meaning that the only viable approach is to use permanently installed monitoring. We propose devices and concepts to enable high temperature monitoring and inspection where it is currently impossible. This is stimulated not only by the industrial imperative, but also by major advances in knowledge and understanding of high temperature piezoelectric materials, in thick film and thin film form, operating at temperatures up to 800C. The attraction in developing high temperature sensors from these materials is that they can be robust, inexpensive and permanently installed on plant. In a novel hybrid system concept, not previously applied to high temperature inspection, we will combine these with improved non-contact ultrasonic generation techniques.

Steel continues to be the most used material in the world by value and play an essential role in all aspects of society, from construction to transport, energy generation to food production. The long-term sustainability of UK steel making requires lower energy production and the development of high value steel products. The ability to measure the microstructure of steel in a non-contact, non-destructive fashion can lead to dramatic improvement in the understanding of the material and its behaviour during processing and in-service. Improved control during processing will increase efficiency in production of complex steel microstructures and allow new generation alloys to be made. Through our previous EPSRC and industry funded research we have created a new electromagnetic (EM) measurement system, EMspecTM, that can monitor the microstructure of strip steel during hot processing. This system is now providing information related to the condition (transformed phase fraction) of the microstructure over 100% of the strip length. The scene is now set to make the next major step forward with the information that new in-line microstructure measurement systems can offer - proposed real-time in-line microstructural engineering, or 'RIME' technology. Our ambition is to enable real-time microstructure engineering during processing via dynamic control of cooling strategies or heat treatment using EM sensor feedback, in particular to engineer microstructures that were previously either impossible to achieve in full scale production or could not be reliably achieved. This will require detailed knowledge of the full temperature - magnetic - microstructure parameter space and sensors that are capable of operating in elevated temperature environments (such as heat treatment facilities), which are not currently available outside the laboratory. In addition application to a wide range of product lines, from strip to plate or sections requires integration of through thickness cooling models and EM signal-depth interpretation all mapped for varying temperature and phase fraction. In this project we will develop new sensors that can operate at high temperature; both laboratory systems to determine full magnetic properties with temperature for model and commercial steels, essential information that is currently unavailable in the literature, and robust deployable sensors for trials in industrial conditions; and systems designed to interrogate for through thickness data. We will develop a demonstration facility, consisting of a furnace, run out table with cooling sprays and EMspecTM system, to allow dynamic feedback control of cooling schedules from EM sensor signals to engineer specific microstructures. Alongside the hardware and demonstration activities we will also develop modelling capabilities, both for sensor design and signal interpretation: our current models are used to relate sensor signals to microstructure (phase fraction and grain size at room temperature) with incorporation of temperature effects planned in this project. A number of case studies have been identified to trial the new technologies including advanced high strength strip steels (AHSS) for light-weighting of vehicles, high strength - high toughness pipeline steels for demanding environments, high strength, more uniform, constructional steels and tailoring microstructure in rod.

If imaging required less data, it would enable faster throughput, improved performance in restricted access situations and simpler, cheaper hardware. The information from images enables damage to be accurately quantified within engineering components, avoiding the need to choose between excessive conservatism and unpredicted failures. To enable improved reconstructions from limited data sets, a diverse set of approaches have been identified, incorporating knowledge of physical wave interaction with objects, use of external information, image processing and other techniques. The fellowship will address the broad problem by applying these approaches to several example applications which are of great interest to industry, and will ultimately enable the development of the field of limited data imaging. While primarily focused on NDE (non-destructive evaluation), the applications of this spread to areas including medicine, geophysics and security.