UT Quality/Technology & insightsInsights/Automated ultrasonic testing
Automated ultrasonic testing (AUT) puts an encoded, recordable ultrasonic inspection on every girth weld — sizing the planar flaws that are difficult to see with conventional radiography, and returning an accept/repair decision at the weld instead of after the darkroom. It is core to what UT Quality does.
A motor-driven scanner band circles the girth weld on a guide ring. Phased-array probes are set to interrogate discrete vertical zones of the weld bevel — root, hot pass, fill and cap — so an indication is located to a specific zone, not just “somewhere in the weld.” A TOFD pair runs alongside to catch and size mid-wall flaws.
How an AUT scanner reads a girth weld
UT Quality fields zonal AUT, phased array (PAUT), semi-automated UT, TOFD, manual UT and encoded corrosion mapping, and pairs methods where the weld calls for it.
Production-rate girth-weld inspection with zone-discriminated phased array — the mainline workhorse for pipeline construction.
Electronically steered and focused beams — run on a hand-driven, encoded semi-automated scanner for tie-ins, repair welds, fittings, nozzles and re-inspections where a scanner band will not fit.
Time-of-flight diffraction for sensitive detection and accurate through-wall sizing of mid-wall planar flaws.
Encoded corrosion mapping for wall-loss surveys, plus computed and real-time radiography (RTR) when radiography is the right call.
A firing line only moves as fast as welds get cleared. Encoded ultrasonics return an accept/repair call at the weld — no film, no development, no next-morning review — so welding, coating, lowering-in and backfill are not waiting on the inspection to catch up.
Versus conventional film radiography, once darkroom development time is counted — the crew never stops for a darkroom. See the exposure-time comparison →
API 1104 recognizes mechanized ultrasonic testing, and its Annex A alternative acceptance criteria — based on engineering critical assessment (ECA) — are built around the flaw height and length sizing that UT provides.
Mainline spreads across Australia, the Middle East and Europe — and major subsea lay vessels — run AUT as a matter of course.
Automated ultrasonic testing is core to what UT Quality does — 130+ documented projects since 2003, 10,000+ pipeline miles inspected, and crews scaled up to 45 across nine spreads.
Crews scaled to the job — up to 45 crews across nine spreads on our largest deployment (Mountaineer XPress, Columbia Gas Transmission).
130+ documented projects since 2003 and 10,000+ pipeline miles inspected, from 6″ to 56″ diameter.
Mainline AUT, repair units and tie-in PAUT crews running in parallel — four-man mainline and two-man repair crews.
Every crew works to a written procedure with Level III oversight of interpretation — keeping calls consistent, auditable and reviewable.
API 1104, ASME Section V, ASME B31.3 and AWS D1.1 — inspected and interpreted to the acceptance criteria your project runs on.
Responsive mobilization of crews and equipment to project sites — scaled to the scope of the job.
UT Quality fields AUT and PAUT crews for pipeline, midstream and industrial construction across the USA, Canada and offshore.
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