July-August 2018 NPJ

A FIRST-OF-A-KIND NDE INNOVATION Structural Integrity Associates, Inc. is pleased to announce the availability of a new Ultrasonic Testing (UT) service to the power generation industry. This new service offering is based on LATITUDE™, a revolutionary non-mechanized position and orientation encoding system designed for use with UT non-destructive examination (NDE) equipment, enabling our operators to collect high-quality encoded data while utilizing a manual examination process. In addition, LATITUDE requires less equipment, fewer people, shorter setup time and runs on battery power. SI provides LATITUDE UT services for the following power generation applications: CORROSION MAPPING LATITUDE, when coupled with the use of a PAUT corrosion mapping probe, enables the encoding of high-resolution thickness data while manually manipulating the inspection probe, resulting in a composite thickness map that requires little to no post-processing for analysis. HOW IT WORKS LATITUDE uses air-born ultrasound to achieve its position tracking capabilities and does so by tracking the position of a small transmitting probe relative to a set, or array, of stationary receiver sensors. The LATITUDE transmitting probe can be attached to a variety of NDE probes and the absolute position of the NDE probe can be tracked multi-dimensionally, relative to the receiver array. Currently, the LATITUDE system can track x (axial) position, y (circumferential) position, probe rotation (skew), and can compensate for pipe (or component) curvature. The LATITUDE system consists of three primary components: the electronic control unit, the receiver array, and the transmitter probe attachment. In Phased Array Ultrasonic Testing (PAUT), the electronic control is integrated with the Zetec TOPAZ™ PAUT instrument and control of the LATITUDE system is done through the customized TOPAZ user interface. The LATITUDE enclosure is sealed, fanless, and can run for up to 10 hours off two hot-swappable batteries, eliminating the need for a 120V power supply. Installing and calibrating the LATITUDE system adds minimal set-up time to that required for a traditional manual examination. LATITUDE has been extensively tested in the laboratory and in a power plant environment and has been demonstrated to be resilient in the presence of acoustic and electromagnetic noise. DISSIMILAR METAL WELDS LATITUDE is the basis of a new procedure for the examination of dissimilar metal welds in nuclear power plants. The procedure, SI- UT-217, was qualified by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in accordance with the rigorous demands of the ASME Code Section XI, Appendix VIII and the Performance Demonstration Initiative (PDI) requirements. ASME CODE EXAMINATIONS LATITUDE UT techniques meet the specific requirements specified the ASME Code, including Section III and XI, B31.1, and B31.3. GENERIC WELD EXAMINATIONS LATITUDE presents a new opportunity to encode manual examinations of weldments where the use of automated or other mechanical encoding methods are impractical or cost prohibitive. It has been used for the examination of girth and seam welds and can be deployed with phased-array UT (PAUT), time-of-flight-diffraction (TOFD), and a range of other NDE technologies. FLAW CHARACTERIZATION Structural Integrity can quickly deploy LATITUDE to confirm and characterize the size of a flaw. The encoded data can then be used by Structural Integrity to support engineering disposition of the flaw. LATITUDE™ DMW Data Circ. Flaw (20% Through-wall) Circ. Flaw (80% Through-wall) ~10 in. ~10 in. LATITUDE™ Corrosion Mapping collected in less than 2 minutes of scanning www.structint.com/npj 877-4SI-POWER SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION