Blog : What's new ?

A very interesting paper about evaluation of commercially available nondestructive examination modelling and simulation software packages used in the nuclear industry was recently published by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). CIVA was selected for this study because it is readily available and has been used for NDE in the nuclear power plant industry. In addition to model assessment, other important aspects influencing simulation results are considered including inputs to the models, computational complexity and model run-times, material microstructures, flaw morphology, etc.

In this report, PNNL focused on the use of CIVA for evaluating models of the ultrasound beam and the use of both beam models and flaw response models for simulating coarse-grained materials in austenitic welds, dissimilar metal welds, and cast austenitic stainless steel materials.

After testing many of the features of the CIVA UT module and running multiple varied simulations, PNNL has demonstrated that CIVA is a powerful and versatile tool for ultrasonic modelling, but it should be used with good knowledge of its limitations.

You can read the full paper here.

The EXTENDE team

CIVA is an expertise platform dedicated to Non Destructive Testing. It includes modelling, imaging and analysis tools, that help to design and optimize inspection methods and to predict their performance for realistic configurations.

The validation of the code is crucial for users as they have to know if the results obtained with CIVA simulations are reliable and accurate in the case of their configurations.

The validation of CIVA code consists in evaluating the reliability/accuracy of its predictions by comparing these predictions to reference results. In general, these are obtained by experiments on mock-ups (experimental validation), but they may also be obtained using other codes or models (model benchmarking, which will be called “numerical” validation here).

These validations are shared with the community on EXTENDE’s website. You can find EXTENDE validation works here  and also validation papers here.

This paper published by EXTENDE in ECNDT 2018 gives an overview of these validation campaigns: “ECNDT paper on CIVA validation campaigns”

Have a look!

The EXTENDE team