FINITE ELEMENT BASED HYBRID MODELS FOR ULTRASONIC NDE USING COMMERCIAL PACKAGES.

ABSTRACT This paper reports work in progress towards achieving improved simulation tools for ultrasonic Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) in the power generation industry. Hybrid models are shown to arise as a natural consequence of a modular approach to tackling complex processes, which is attractive in the face of the increasing sophistication of practical ultrasonic inspection. It is argued that although such models are not new to the community, there is an urgent need for developing them to be independent of their constituent methods and that an interface mechanism capable of handling field quantities in the near-field is essential to achieve optimal performance. A domain-linking algorithm capable of stable performance in the near-field is then presented and preliminary Finite Element simulation studies for validating the procedure and demonstrating its capabilities show positive results . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]