With the constant growth of the domestic industry, the demand for the development of efficient tools for inspection and monitoring of structural integrity of equipment and structures also grows. Among these, non-destructive testing have been used. Considering to the non-destructive techniques applied to inspection of components used in oil industries, the use of the conventional ultra-sound technique for location and sizing of defects has proved to be important. However, in the field inspections, due to the frequent lack of orientation of defects, are utilized methodologies that use many incident angles and systems analysis of signals, resulting in a slow and subjective inspection. With the increasing of demand for online inspection, the necessity for faster and more reliable processes has been raised, among these, the use of the time of flight diffraction. This work presents TOFD technique as an efficient tool to determine the height of artificials reflectors machined in samples of SAE 1022 steel, from calibration according to British Standard 7706:1993. For this, it was elaborated a methodology using four different variations (frequency / angle) of inspection, verifying the potential of the method in analysis of different heights, in order to apply in inspection and monitoring of equipments. Results show that as for notches breaking in the surface inspected as for notches breaking in the inside surface, opposite the scanned surface, sizing can be precise, if the correct variation (frequency / angle) for each case was chosen.
non destructive test; operational confiabillity; TOFD
