Assessment of Process Induced Welding Flaws in Structural Steel Members Using Phased Array Ultrasonic Nondestructive Testing

Welding is indispensable in structural steel members due to its ability to create strong, durable, and versatile connections essential for constructing safe, efficient, and resilient infrastructure.Welded parts must be inspected to ensure they meet required quality and integrity standards.Quality assurance measures such as nondestructive testing (NDT) can be employed to verify the integrity of welds, providing confidence in the structural integrity of steel members.A range of nondestructive testing (NDT) techniques may be used for welding inspection which depends on several factors including geometry and configuration of the joints, material, thickness of the welded parts, and inspection environment.Among the variety of NDT methods, configurations of ultrasonic testing (UT) are identified as efficient techniques of inspection for welding.Despite the effectiveness of the traditional UT techniques, the accuracy and repeatability of them can be significantly improved via advanced phased array technology.In this study, phased array UT (PAUT) is used to evaluate the quality of the welding in steel samples which were fabricated in various welding processing conditions.Potential flaws have been identified and verified by material characterization procedures.Results show that the phased array ultrasonic testing can provide localized quality information of the weld and correlate to the mechanical properties (e.g., strength) of the part in welding region.