Design And Implementation Of The Ultrasonic Testing And Diagnosis System For High Temperature Furnace Tube

Hydrogen production equipment is an important link in the production of petrochemical industry and the high temperature furnace tube is the core component of hydrogen production equipment. Cracks will occur inside the tubes owing to tough and complex work environment, leading to partial dehiscence as time goes on, which impactes the safety of the equipment seriously. As a result, the tubes need regular maintenance. Ultrasonic testing is the primary means of the damage detection of the tubes as it is accurate, reliable, cheap, safe and easy to operate.The ultrasonic testing apparatus on the market is mainly based on portable digital ultrasonic detector at present which is suitable for manual detection to a single testing point and has low efficiency. The modular analog ultrasonic testing system which achieved continuous and rapid detection was invented on the basis of the characteristics of the high temperature furnace tube. However, the testing data is hard to save and deal with and the testing results are affected by welds. Besides, it also has disadvantages of large volume, heavy weight and difficult to assemble. Moreover, with the rapid development of ultrasonic testing technology and computer technology, the manufacturing of ultrasonic testing equipment has significantly changed. Therefore the research on the new ultrasonic testing system which has higher digital, portable and intelligent level is extremely meaningful. And this paper researches the electronic part of the new system.The new system is upgraded by using virtual instrument technology and consists of a motion measuring device and a virtual ultrasonic testing instrument. It has the function of weld recognition, creeping detection, position detection, digital display and storage and intelligent diagnosis. The motion measuring device is composed of ultrasound transducer bracket and data acquisition device which is controlled by C8051F005 SCM. The virtual ultrasonic testing instrument is composed of ultrasonic data acquisition card, wireless sending and receiving device as well as the software and hardware of compute. The key of the design in this part is to write the ultrasonic testing application software in which Microsoft Foundation Classes(MFC) is used to design the graphical user interface and Back-Propagation Neural Network is used for intelligent diagnosis.Many testers say that the interface of the software is friendly and convenient after using the system. The testing results in a number of petrochemical companies show that the data acquisition section is stable and reliable and the accuracy of the intelligent diagnosis is close to that of testing experts.