Abstract
It is of great significance to deeply understand the characteristics of wave propagation in austenitic steel welds for precisely detecting and sizing flaws in welding areas or heat affected zones. In this paper, ultrasound, excited by a focal longitudinal type transducer in austenitic steel welding areas, is performed by finite element method, where Ogilvy's model for austenitic welds used in ray tracing is applied. The numerical results show that longitudinal waves propagate easily through the weld and longitudinal diffracted waves from a notch tip are much stronger than shear diffracted ones. Shear waves, however, are refracted in the weld and make their way to the bottom of weld. Numerical predictions of received echoes are in good agreement with the relative experimental measurements.
