Research on a laser ultrasound method for testing the quality of a nuclear radiation protection structure

Laser ultrasonics has been investigated for inspecting the quality of a nuclear radiation protection structure. A possibility is proposed to improve the signal to noise ratio (SNR) of a laser ultrasonic inspection system. Then, a nuclear radiation protection structure composed of an AISI 1045 steel sheet connected with a lead alloy sheet by using an epoxy resin adhesive was manufactured with simulated defects. A non-contact laser ultrasonic inspection system, where the measured signals were filtered using a wavelet threshold de-noising method, was established to conduct a series of experiments. The proposed signal processing method can significantly improve the SNR of measured laser ultrasound signals on a rough solid surface. Compared with the SNR of original ultrasonic signals measured in transmission and reflection, the SNR of processed transmitted and reflected signals is improved by 13.8 and 16.6 dB, respectively. Moreover, laser ultrasonic C-scans based on the transmission and pulse-echo method can detect the simulated de-bonding defects, and the relative deviation between the measured sizes and design values is below 9%. Therefore, the laser ultrasonic method combined with effective signal processing can achieve the quantitative characterization of de-bonding defects in nuclear radiation protection structures.