Defect Size Measurement of Wall Thinned Pipe Using Shearography and Digital Image Correlation

Abstract

Defect size of wall thinned pipe is measured by using Speckle Shearing Interferometry (SSI) and Digital Image Correlation (DIC) techniques. A wall thinned defect of a carbon steel pipe was typically caused by flow accelerated corrosion (FAC). As wall thinned pipe can cause a huge accident at the nuclear power plant (NPP), a wall thinned defect should be detected for structure safety. SSI is one of the optical nondestructive techniques and can provide to inspect in real-time and to measure on the whole visible area at a time. DIC is a kind of the visual testing method. This method which uses a stereo vision system can measure the deformation or strain/stress of a structure in 3D. In this paper, ASTM A106 Gr.B carbon steel pipe is used as specimen. When the pressure load is provided by the pressure pump, the out-of-plane deformation along the longitudinal direction of a pipe can be detected quantitatively. Both results of SSI and DIC experiments are compared.