Quality control of pipes
Methods of nondestructive control are used for quality control of inner structure of different products, damage and dismantling of which are not allowed, but the main area of its use is metallurgical industry, including cast and welding of the pipes. By making cast and welded products it is necessary to examine them for latent cracks, blowholes, discontinuities, micro- and macro voids, as well as liquation inclusions (differences in chemical composition in different parts of casting).
By control of structure and features of pipe metal different methods of nondestructive control are used, but specialists often choose the X-ray method: this method is applicable for finding of inner defects of any castings of steel, crude iron, aluminum, magnesium and other materials.
Such examinations are based on the proposition that X-rays which have passed through the casting have different intensity in case of having inhomogeneity of material — defects and emptinesses are shown at the X-ray image as black spots.
Equipment for pipes quality control by X-ray method
X-ray equipment for such examinations is rather different, but in most cases it is used with the visualization system: camera (or other digital device of image capture) and computer with specialized software installed on it. Such machine vision systems aimed at executing pipe quality control as well as quality control of welding joints and seams, make examiner’s work easier, and, because of software constituent provide great choice of actions for processing the received images and conducting measurements.
Altami software for pipes quality control
Software used for examination of X-ray pipe photos and welded joints should provide not only possibilities for improving quality of input images, but also provide possibilities for improving quality of images, their analysis and processing, as well as the tools for conducting different measurements.
Altami Studio application allows to edit dark, low-contrast X-ray image, besides, in it tools allowing to find length, perimeter, object are in the image (that means, with its help it is possible to measure length, breadth and depth, as well as perimeter and defects area) and to find location of these damages are developed. Also, detecting objects parameters in the image is possible by using the tool of its automatic search.
On the basis of Altami Studio and using other developments in the sphere of automatic image processing it is possible to create the software product with automatic operations on finding defects and detecting its parameters for carrying out quality control.
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