Periodic inspection of the integrity of welds is essential for maintaining safe and efficient operation of critical assets. Methods based on ultrasound have numerous advantages – they are fast, accessible and non-disruptive – but they meet serious obstacles when used on thick welds with a complex microstructure. The H2020 ADVISE project developed and demonstrated techniques to address these challenges in the nuclear energy context. For most of these, the knowledge of the internal material structure of the weld is essential. Building up foundations laid by ADVISE, iWeld aims to progress towards implementing the imaging and characterisation methods insitu
and broaden their application scope beyond the nuclear energy sector. The project will combine insights from a wide spectrum
of industries to construct a comprehensive weld library which will be used to train an AI model predicting the internal material
structure of the weld. These predictions will be used in further refined inversion and imaging algorithms to deliver a comprehensive inspection planning workflow. The ambition of iWeld is to transform the way to perform ultrasonic inspection on complex welds across several branches of industry and to deliver open tools to support their development.
Project partners: Electricité de France (EDF) (France), University of Southampton (United Kingdom), Commissariat ? l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA) (France), Transvalor SA (France), University of Stuttgart (USTUTT) (Germany), Imperial College London (ICL) (United Kingdom), Extende (France).
Project funding:
Euratom Research and Training Programme
Project results:
• iWeld will improve the understanding of the effect of the microstructure and its associated uncertainty on ultrasonic imaging;
• iWeld will develop robust AI assisted methods for high reliability inspection of complex welds and increase the presence of modern computer technology in critical asset management.
• iWeld will generalise and demonstrate the proposed technique to sectors other than nuclear, guided by the needs and expectations of the end-users;
• iWeld will provide a methodology for implementing the intelligent inspection technique by partner industries, providing a basis for an application for a formal inspection qualification.
Period of project implementation: 2022-10-01 - 2026-09-30
Project coordinator: Electricite de France (EDF)
Project partners: COMMISSIONER FOR ATOMIC ENERGY AND ALTERNATIVE ENERGIES, University of Stuttgart, EXTENDE, Kaunas University of Technology, Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine
