Experimental Study of Multiple Scattering in Anisotropic Titanium Alloys.

Ultrasonic testing of jet engine titanium alloys is of high importance for the aircraft manufacturing industry. The quality of ultrasonic non-destructive testing is severely impacted by the titanium complex microstructure. These alloys have been extensively studied and single scattering models are now well known and implemented in ultrasonic propagation simulators. In addition, titanium billets and forged parts have been known to exhibit a highly anisotropic microstructure. We studied ultrasonic wave scattering in Til7 forged disk, through statistical analysis of the backscattered noise generated by the microstructure. More specifically, we focused on the quantification of multiple scattering relative to single scattering in the backscattered wave. To that end, we used the full matrix capture acquisition with a linear transducer array. Two phenomena were used to quantify the proportion of single scattering with respect to multiple scattering. The first is the coherent backscattering effect, used as a binary indicator of multiple scattering. The second is a repurposed version of the multiple scattering filter, recently developed on random rod forest and applied on Inconel alloys. With these methods, significant level of multiple scattering was consistently measured in Til7 forged disks, showing that ultrasonic testing could be enhanced by filtering the multiple scattering contribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]