Industrial Applications

Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) for Steel Manufacturing

Customer Case

The customer is a custom-built contractor of Non-Destructive Test (NDT) instruments for steel manufacturing.

NDT uses ultrasonic pulses to scan through thick sheets of metals for possible causes of early wear, such as cracks or impurities.

The stimulus is a stream of ultrasonic pulses. The response is their reflection from various depths. The center frequencies used by this customer are in the range of 250 KHz to 2.25 MHz and pulses are about 10 microseconds. The pulse repeat frequency (PRF) is less than 1 KHz.

The thickness of steel sheets is in the range of 2.5 to 30 cm. The speed of ultrasound in steel is 5920 meters/second, therefore time interval range for the received response echo transition is 296 microseconds to 3.552 milliseconds. At least twenty transitions are required for a reliable reading.

GaGe Case Solution

GaGe’s CompuScope 1450 provides the digitizer performance necessary for the stimulus pulse and echo with its 50 MS/s sampling rate and 14-bit vertical resolution.

The customer requires data captures for the echo pulses from the start of stimulus to the end of reflection. The maximum required on-board memory should cover at least 3.552 * 20 = 71 ms of capture. Consequently, the on-board memory requirement is:

71 ms x 50 MegaSample/second = 71 ms x 50 kiloSample/ms = 3.55 MegaSamples

Accordingly, GaGe recommended the on-board memory depth of 8 MegaSamples for the CS1450.

The customer had developed analysis software in LabVIEW and is easily able to incorporate the sample programs from the CompuScope Software Development Kit (SDK) for LabVIEW.

The combination of GaGe’s hardware and SDK enables this customer to provide a commercial product quickly and economically.

GaGe Case Recommended Products

Industrial Application Request

We encourage you to contact us and discuss your industrial application in more detail with our engineering team. GaGe can provide tailored custom data acquisition hardware and software solutions to meet specific application requirements.