An Evolutionary Tomographic Reconstruction Procedure for Defect Identification Using Time-of-Flight of Ultrasound

Structural integrity of engineering materials is influenced by external as well as internal defects. Tomographic reconstruction is useful for detection of internal defects in a nondestructive way. A novel tomographic reconstruction procedure is described and shown to have the potential to identify any defects present in a materials cross-section. The algorithm is designed in line with the principles of real coded genetic algorithms (RCGA). The proposed algorithm does not require the user to input exact characteristic property of material defects assumed to be present in the material cross-section being examined. The algorithm works its way with some finite range of the characteristic property as input. Results of several numerical studies demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed RCGA based reconstruction procedure.