The ultrasonic testing (UT) of austenitic steel welds is an important issue for the nuclear industry. Because of their dendritic structure, austenitic welds may present heterogeneous and anisotropic properties affecting the propagation of the ultrasound. In this context, the use of efficient simulation tools is particularly helpful to understand these phenomena, to design and demonstrate the performances of inspections. In this communication we present a 3D finite element solution developed in order to offer to the end-user a reference code complementing the semi-analytical solutions&nbsp;already proposed in the software. This solution is based on a generic numerical strategy based on the use of spectral finite elements method (SFEM) and of a block-structured domain decomposition adopted since several years at CEA in order to handle various complex transient UT problems.The current application to weld inspection has been developed in the framework of the European project ADVISE. In this work the high order SFEM code has been coupled to the ray-based model of CIVA in order to compute the source field at the surface of the part. The propagation in the component is entirely calculated by the SFEM, either in 2D or 3D. By considering effective anisotropic properties, whose symmetry is correlated to the grain orientation variation in the weld, we handle a wide range of configurations, taking into account the anisotropic spatial variations and damping behaviours of the coherent wave propagating into the weld.In this present study, we detail the principle of the coupling method and the main features of the dedicated SFEM calculation kernel. Several representative use cases are presented in order to illustrate the performances and capabilities of this simulation tool that should soon be available on the CIVA platform.

A 3d Spectral Finite Element Solution to Simulate Ultrasonic Inspection of Austenitic Welds

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/qnde/QNDE2021/volume/85529

ASME 2021 48th Annual Review of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation (QNDE2021)

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