Assortment of ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation signals using the centroid searching method with the LMS algorithm and SAFT

Abstract NDE using ultrasonic signals is a very useful technique for the assessment of solid materials, construction, food, and biomedicine. Among many NDE methods, the ultrasonic inspections may involve the extraction of an appropriate set of features or a neural network for the classification of the signals in the feature space. This paper presents an approach that uses a geometric method and the LMS (Least Mean Square) algorithm to determine the coordinates of the ultrasonic probe followed by the SAFT (Synthetic Aperture Focusing Technique) and centroid searching technique to estimate the location of the ultrasonic reflector. The proposed method is employed to classify ultrasound NDE signals from cracks and deposits within steam generator tubes in a nuclear power plant.