Electric Power Research Institute Incorporated

Morton International, Inc.

Sierra Matrix, Inc.

Samuel Hersh

Marvin F Fleming

Marcus T Clark

David D Schroeder

Soung-Nan Liu

Clark C Strong

An inflator for an airbag system has a target mounted in the pressurized gas contained in the inflator. An ultrasonic transducer is mounted on an external surface of the inflator in alignment with the target. The transducer generates and receives reflected ultrasonic signals from the target. The time-of-flight of the signals which are dependent on the gas pressure are used to determine the gas pressure in the inflator. Temperature compensation is provided by fabricating the target of bimetallic material which changes the spacing of the target from the transducer with temperature or providing a temperature sensitive element, e.g. a thermocouple to electrically provide temperature compensation.

Ultrasonic gas pressure measurement for inflators of vehicular airbag

A self-contained, portable, hands free, one man ultrasonic test view is disclosed. The system can include a variety of features including a semiautomatic scanner for positioning a probe at various locations within a selected region of a specimen that is powered only in one axis with the second axis being manually advanceable by the user. A second feature is a display that is mountable in front of one eye so that the user of the system can simultaneously view the displayed ultrasonic response signal with one eye while viewing the specimen with the other eye to mentally superimpose the one on the other. Another feature is the inclusion in the processor of a voice recognition device to detect and translate voice commands to select and control the operations of the processor together with a microphone for the user to deliver voice commands to the system. Yet another feature is the inclusion in the processor of memory devices capable of storing the returned and corresponding processed signals and the system set-up parameters for later use. There is also a battery power subsystem to make the system fully portable.

Hands-free ultrasonic test view (HF-UTV)

A method for simulating in real-time the ultrasonic inspection of flaws in power plant components such as piping stores the X, Y and skew data relating to a specific waveform and a specific flaw in a unique format in a multi-disk rotational data storage. The skew angles are respectively stored on one side of a disk with the X-axis data relating to tracks on the disk and the Y-axis data to sectors on the disk. In this manner waveform data of several bytes which represent a defect or flaw can be retrieved and displayed to the user of this simulation system. A RAM is utilized as a cache memory.

Method of simulating ultrasonic inspection of flaws

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Danville, CA, United States of America

Samuel Hersh