Laser Surface Mapping - Surface Inspection Solution
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Laser/Ultrasonic Furnace Inspection System
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Problem:
Our customer provides cleaning
services for furnace tubes and wanted to add inspection capability to their business.
Furnace tube sizes range from 4” to 8” in diameter and can have tight bends with a bend radius equal to
the tube diameter. For simplicity of operation, the system needed to be autonomous
such that the inspection tool could be inserted at one end of the furnace tube, flushed through the tube with water and then
collected at the other end. The furnace tubes can be several thousand feet long.
The inspection tool is required to detect wall thinning, ID pitting, bulging,
and swelling.
Solution:
QUEST designed, fabricated and
delivered a family of tools that cover the range of tube sizes from 4” to 8”.
The system uses two technologies, a high resolution laser scanner to map the inside surface of the furnace tube and
an ultrasonic array to measure wall thickness. The raw signals produced by the
laser scanner and ultrasonic transducers are processed with high speed on-board computers and stored into non-volatile memory
for later retrieval once the tool has been removed from the tube. The inspection
results are downloaded from the tool and displayed on a standard PC compatible computer.
The Inspection System shown is the 4 inch tool. Two modules are for the
ultrasonic scanner, two modules are for the laser scanner, and the other two modules are for the battery and position sensors.
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